The Art of the Con–Learning from Bernard Madoff

Posted on by Azra Raza

Michael Shermer in The Scientific American:

Art-of-the-con-learn-from-madoff_1 On a Los Angeles street corner in 2000, I was the “inside man” in a classic con game called the pigeon drop. A magician named Dan Harlan orchestrated it for a television series I co-hosted called Exploring the Unknown (type “Shermer, con games” into Google). Our pigeon was a man from whom I asked directions to the local hospital while Dan (the “outside man”) moved in and appeared to find a wallet full of cash on the ground. After it was established that the wallet belonged to neither of us and appeared to have about $3,000 in it, Dan announced that we should split the money three ways.

I objected on moral grounds, insisting that we ask around first, which Dan agreed to do only after I put the cash in an envelope and secretly switched it for an envelope with magazine pages stuffed in it. Before he left on his moral crusade, however, Dan insisted that we each give him some collateral (“How do I know you two won't just take off with the money while I'm gone?”). I enthusiastically offered $50 and suggested that the pigeon do the same. He hesitated, so I handed him the sealed envelope full of what he believed was the cash (but was actually magazine pages), which he then tucked safely into his pocket as he willingly handed over to Dan his entire wallet, credit cards and ID. A few minutes after Dan left, I acted agitated and took off in search of him, leaving the pigeon standing on the street corner with a phony envelope and no wallet!

More here.



Tuesday, March 3, 2009

Reframing Human Rights in the Global Era: A tribute to Sergio Vieira de Mello

Posted on by Robin Varghese

Fernando Henrique Cardoso in openDemocracy:

Sergio's entire life was dedicated to the ideals of human rights and humanitarian work. For him freedom and human dignity were the foundation of peace and justice. Sergio was courageous and compassionate. Bold but also pragmatic. Often at the frontlines but always taking the side of the weak, the vulnerable, the powerless. Uncompromising in his principles but with a gift for listening to and learning from those he worked with. He had the capacity to combine a maximum flexibility in dealing with the complexities of real life situations with a strong commitment to basic values. This allowed him to stand unequivocally on the side of the victims while talking to all the parties involved. Perhaps this is as close as one can get to being a practitioner of what I would call the art of politics: this combination of vision and pragmatism, flexibility in the means and consistency on the goals.

From Cambodia to Bosnia, Rwanda to Kosovo, East Timor to Iraq, Sergio came to grips with some of the most dreadful conflicts of the last decades. Time and again he was confronted with life and death questions for which there were no easy answers. How to balance the obligation to protect the victims with the denunciation of human rights violations? What kinds of compromise are or are not acceptable to minimize human suffering? At what point pragmatism becomes complacency in the face of the unacceptable? When is dialogue no longer an option and the aggressor has to be engaged despite the risk that, in the short term, the level of violence may increase? How to define this moment in which, faced with massive human rights abuses and crimes against humanity, it is legitimate to use force in the pursuit of peace?

Writing for a living: a joy or a chore?

Posted on by Robin Varghese
9 writers discuss in the Guardian. Will Self:

Self130 I gain nothing but pleasure from writing fiction; short stories are foreplay, novellas are heavy petting – but novels are the full monte. Frankly, if I didn't enjoy writing novels I wouldn't do it – the world hardly needs any more and I can think of numerous more useful things someone with my skills could be engaged in. As it is, the immersion in parallel but believable worlds satisfies all my demands for vicarious experience, voyeurism and philosophic calithenics. I even enjoy the mechanics of writing, the dull timpani of the typewriter keys, the making of notes – many notes – and most seducttive of all: the buying of stationery. That the transmogrification of my beautiful thoughts into a grossly imperfect prose is always the end result doesn't faze me: all novels are only a version- there is no Platonic ideal. But I'd go further still: fiction is my way of thinking about and relating to the world; if I don't write I'm not engaged in any praxis, and lose all purchase.

[H/t: Maeve Adams]

Farewell to Tayeb Salih

Posted on by Robin Varghese

Season-of-migration-to-the-north-190x300 In Arab Comment:

They are dying by the day. First, there was Edward Said, then Mahmoud Darwish, and now Tayeb Salih.

If Said sang about the pleasures of the “placeless place,” Darwish wrote like a jealous child unwilling to share the page with any one, a ruthless occupier in particular. Salih, on the other hand, spent most of his life on borderline between East, West, and the Rest. As a thinker, citizen, and writer, he towered quietly over our time with extraordinary luminosity. He also had a prodigious capacity for understanding people no matter where they came from.

A sign well defined in his chef-d’oeuvre, Season of Migration to the North, where the narrator intones: “The [the Sudanese people] were amazed to learn that Europeans with some differences were much like us, marrying and raising children in accordance with tradition and that generally they were a moral and honest people.” A humanist voice at its best! This is not the nonsense one finds in shabby screeds likes the “clash of cultures” or “what went wrong?”

Suffice it to add that Salih had an unbounded energy for waging struggles on behalf of the truth—the truth not only of usually unrecorded social suffering, but also the truth about the institutional obduracy that lurks beneath the surface of things, and a persistent endeavor of his last years the callous posturing of so-called realistic, or pragmatic writers.

Power never phased or impressed Si Tayeb, as he was often called: he took on its many contemporary forms with undaunted courage. When the 2005-Cairo Third Arab Novel Conference sought to salvage something of the reputation of its much coveted prize by awarding it to Salih, the decision raised eyebrows. The recipients of the same prize had been Saudi novelist Abdul-Rahman Munif, Sonallah Ibrahim who turned it down, and Gamal El-Ghitani, who belongs to Ibrahim’s defiant generation, declined to be named for the award. “With all due respect Tayeb Salih is an outstanding novelist,” he chimed in, “his winning of the prize does not whitewash the event.”

No Bourgeoisie, No Democracy

Posted on by Robin Varghese

Moore The Economist revisits Barrington Moore:

In 1966 Barrington Moore, an American historian, pithily summarised decades of scholarly opinion in his formula, “no bourgeoisie, no democracy”.

But that view has been changing. Moore’s academic successors increasingly see the middle class as marginal to establishing a democracy. Some of them think that the poor are more influential, others that the main actors are particular individuals, not social groups. In much of the post-communist and developing worlds, the giddy hopes for liberal democracy that grew up after the Berlin Wall came down have given way to a period of disappointment and democratic stagnation. Despite the huge growth in the middle class, the number of elected democracies worldwide, as tracked by Freedom House, an American advocacy group, has been flat since the mid-1990s.

China’s 800m-strong new middle class has conspicuously failed to rise up against its rulers.

Russia’s smaller, weaker middle class seems to have colluded in the reversal of hard-won but fragile freedoms: hence the popularity (across all classes) of Mr Putin. In both countries, middle-class fear of instability seems to have trumped democratic impulses. Their middle classes have also provided some particularly ugly manifestations of aggressive nationalism: for example, during the controversy over the Olympic torch for last year’s Beijing Games, and in Russia’s war on Georgia.

where was terrence malick sleeping?

Posted on by Morgan Meis

Article_leigh

For a particular type of cinephile from my generation—those of us born in the early ’60s and raised on a strict diet of left-leaning, somewhat Eurocentric art and culture—the physical act of seeking out and consuming great or hallowed or mythical films was as obsessive as our need to experience these films, when and if we found them. When I say physical, I’m talking about the rumors traded among cinephiles, the stories and the clues. We wrote letters to long-forgotten crew members of neglected masterpieces and arranged meetings in difficult-to-pronounce European cities still shrouded behind the Iron Curtain. We sent money orders or contraband to shady PO boxes in hopes of hitting the mother lode. (That’s how I got my hands on Bergman’s Merry Widow script, crafted as a showcase for Barbra Streisand and set aside when it could not be financed.) Did Jacques Rivette’s twelve-hour-and-forty-minute version of Out 1, noli me tangere, supposedly screened at Le Havre in 1971, really exist? Could sequences from the abandoned version of Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo, the one starring Jason Robards and Mick Jagger (before Robards had a massive heart attack and Klaus Kinski replaced him), be bought on black-market videotape?

more from The Believer here.

talking turkey

Posted on by Morgan Meis

Benhabib-seyla

The Turkish model of laïcité is unique in that the state continues to direct religious affairs: the thousands of Muslim clerics who serve in mosques are educated in state-sponsored institutions of higher learning. In the last three decades, however, this peculiar Turkish model has become destabilized, and the sociological firewalls that the Turkish republic tried to erect between state and religion have turned out not to be as thick as the Kemalist revolutionaries imagined. The ensuing difficulties are nicely suggested by a question recently posed by Jürgen Habermas: “How should we see ourselves as members of a post-secular society and what must we reciprocally expect from one another in order to ensure that in firmly entrenched nation states, social relations remain civil despite the growth of a plurality of cultures and religious world views?” Habermas asks this question with an eye to the conflict between European societies and their Muslim residents and citizens. In Turkey, where the majority of the population is Muslim but where a modern constitutional understanding of citizenship and civil rights is institutionalized, the question requires a nuanced response. I will try to respond by reexamining the “headscarf ban” and the legislative struggles surrounding it.

more from Dissent here.

the sun is god

Posted on by Morgan Meis

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ON HIS DEATHBED in 1851, at the home of his mistress, the great English painter J. M. W. Turner is said to have offered an enviably neat summary of his life’s work and beliefs. Having produced hundreds of oil paintings and watercolors over the previous six decades – a corpus of landscapes that would redefine European art – Turner simply declared: “The sun is God.” In the century after Turner’s death, landscape painting became the great engine of modern artistic creativity. Artists did in fact live by chasing the sun, capturing the way it felt in the world in ever more pioneering ways. Turner’s pale and radiant scenes changed the way artists painted light; his main rival, John Constable, was similarly influential with his moody evocations of shifting weather. The French painters who followed – Monet, Manet, Pissarro, Degas – successively pushed the boundaries of artistic innovation, and created landscapes that still count today among the great works of art, bridging both serious and popular tastes. In our own time, landscape painting retains an unquestionable popular appeal. As civilization pulls us further and further from nature, it’s no surprise that we cherish glimpses of arcadia. Landscapes have become nearly ubiquitous: in living rooms and waiting rooms; on fine china and restaurant walls; at adult ed and on PBS; in regular blockbuster exhibitions and on the resulting sweatshirts, mugs, and even refrigerator magnets. There is one place, however, where landscapes have almost disappeared: serious contemporary painting.

more from Boston Globe Ideas here.

Tuesday Poem

Posted on by Jim Culleny

Crutches
Nikki Giovanni

it's not the crutches we decry
it's the need to move forward
though we haven't the strength

women aren't allowed to need
so they develop rituals
since we all know working hands idle
the devil
women aren't supposed to be strong
so they develop social smiles
and secret drinking problems
and female lovers whom they never touch
except in dreams

men are supposed to be strong
so they have heart attacks
and develop other women
who don't know their weaknesses
and hide their fears
behind male lovers
whom they religiously touch
each saturday morning on the basketball court
it's considered a sign of health doncha know
that they take such good care
of their bodies

i'm trying to say something about the human condition
maybe i should try again

In a Helpless Baby, the Roots of Our Social Glue

Posted on by Azra Raza

Natalie Angier in The New York Times:

Baby In seeking bipartisan support for his economic policies, President Obama has tried every tip on the standard hospitality crib sheet: beer and football, milk and cookies, Earth, Wind and Fire. Maybe the president needs to borrow a new crib sheet — the kind with a genuine baby wrapped inside. A baby may look helpless. It can’t walk, talk, think symbolically or overhaul the nation’s banking system. Yet as social emulsifiers go, nothing can beat a happily babbling baby. A baby is born knowing how to work the crowd. A toothless smile here, a musical squeal there, and even hard-nosed cynics grow soft in the head and weak in the knees.

In the view of the primatologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, the extraordinary social skills of an infant are at the heart of what makes us human. Through its ability to solicit and secure the attentive care not just of its mother but of many others in its sensory purview, a baby promotes many of the behaviors and emotions that we prize in ourselves and that often distinguish us from other animals, including a willingness to share, to cooperate with strangers, to relax one’s guard, uncurl one’s lip and widen one’s pronoun circle beyond the stifling confines of me, myself and mine. As Dr. Hrdy argues in her latest book, “Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding,” which will be published by Harvard University Press in April, human babies are so outrageously dependent on their elders for such a long time that humanity would never have made it without a break from the great ape model of child-rearing. Chimpanzee and gorilla mothers are capable of rearing their offspring pretty much through their own powers, but human mothers are not.

More here.

Monday, March 2, 2009

Music in the Service of Cosmology: Popol Vuh and Giacinto Scelsi

Posted on by Edward Rackley

Edward B. Rackley

The best thing about long-distance driving is the sonic qualities of the enclosed acoustic chamber that is the car itself. On a recent pre-dawn drive through the eastern lowlands of North Carolina, two recordings kept me present and transfixed. I knew the pieces well, but the striking commonalities of the two artists had never occurred to me. Their sounds and compositional forms differ dramatically, but both share a belief that music exists to reflect basic cosmological principles—from silence comes word, from tone rhythm, from decay renewal, etc. In different ways, their compositions deliver a direct experience of what each believes to be cosmological truths.

Named after the Mayan genesis myth, Popol Vuh is a German progressive (‘prog’) band best known for its soundtracks to Werner Herzog’s early films. Led by Florian Fricke, Popol Vuh flourished for over three decades, leaving a long and varied discography. Originally a classics scholar, Giacinto Scelsi was an Italian composer often associated with the minimalist movement, despite his music being packed with activity. Scelsi studied Berg and Schoenberg but later abandoned western compositional style in favor of powerful, occasionally violent, monotonal variations.

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‘All that is solid melts into air’

I used to imagine insanity in the person of ‘Mr. Madcap Laughs’, Syd Barrett himself, seated at a piano and staring vacantly out a window, repeatedly striking a single key. Such a moment must have occurred, I thought, as a healthy musical mind lost its bearings to madness. Then I learned about Scelsi, whose biography actually involved a similar episode, with one important variation. In complete breakdown after a divorce, Scelsi reportedly remained slumped at his piano playing a single note over and over again. Fully absorbing each note’s resonance and decay, he later cited the experience as therapy, claiming it triggered his compositional transformation and opened the door to his entire future oeuvre.

Read more »

Asian Food for Thought

Posted on by Namit Arora

By Namit Arora

People09 Growing up in India, I ate meat only a handful of times until I left home for college. My mother, a moderately pious Hindu, had a deep aversion to eating animals and wouldn’t allow meat in her kitchen (I also remember her kindness and sympathy towards the ragged animals that shared our city streets: cows, dogs, horses, goats, cats, donkeys, and even occasional elephants and camels). My father was vegetarian for the most part, except when, on rare occasions, he pretended to enjoy a few morsels of meat. I think he did this despite himself, mostly to project the public image of an adventurous, cosmopolitan man. If no one were looking, I’m sure he would have picked a vegetarian option nine times out of ten.

MeatMarket3I only ate meat when my older sister brought home a chicken or mutton dish from a friend’s place, or cooked it herself on a Sunday morning on a kerosene stove in our courtyard. When she cooked, my task was to procure the meat. I would bike up to the butcher’s shop and await my turn, squeamishly eyeing the goat carcasses hanging on hooks, and gallantly ask the man for ‘the best cuts,’ to which he always replied, ‘only the best for you, son.’ Washing and cleaning the meat, I felt a strange exhilaration—I saw it not as food but as the flesh and bone of a dead animal, hacked to bits just hours ago. Mother allowed my sister to use only the most beaten down utensils from her kitchen and later instructed the maid to scrub them clean thrice as long.

Still, my parents encouraged us to eat meat, holding it to be salutary for growing kids. Their attitude later struck me as similar to Gandhi’s during his early struggle and experimentation with eating animals. Gandhi saw meat as a contributor to the enviable vigor, material progress, and sturdier physiques of people from the West, which conflicted with his own traditional disposition—and of his social class—against eating meat.

Slow-roasted-lamb I was introduced to eating fish and prawns in college. Thereafter, living outside India, I began eating other animals too—cow, pig, turkey, crab, squid, etc. I had non-vegetarian food several times a week and it became a key part of my cooking repertoire—I acquired a bevy of fans for my spicy lamb curry and barbequed chicken. On my travels, I even sampled lobster, shark, snail, venison, guinea pig, and wild boar. But in the ensuing years my meat intake began to decline. I came to relish it less and less. About eight years ago, I gave up eating mammals, and now almost always choose vegetarian. Long live tofu, beans, lentils, and the huge range of Indian vegetarian cuisine.

Read more »

LUI: Living Under the Influence

Posted on by Shiban Ganju

by Shiban Ganju

We spent approximately $115.9 billion to buy alcohol in the USA in 2003 and spent billons more to treat its ravaging effects on our bodies. We are not alone. All people – Asian, European, American, and African – enjoy and suffer almost equally. No society is exempt; rich spend discretionary income while poor spend sustenance money; liberal societies buy it from the local liquor stores and conservative societies get surreptitious home delivery. And our world has about 140 million LUI – living under the influence.

One of them may be Mark, your high school buddy who staggers towards you and slurs at your class reunion. You notice: Mark has changed more than others; he looks different – the purplish hue of his face, red dots below his visible collar bone, lush thick hair, his tremulous hands with pink palms – he has aged more. You suspect alcohol. How do you verify? Simple: apply the CAGE test. Ask four questions. Are you concerned that you may be drinking too much and want to cut down? Are you annoyed when asked about your alcohol habit? Do you feel guilty about drinking? Do you need an ‘eye opener’ – a drink early in the morning just to get started? If Mark cares to entertain your curiosity and says yes to at least two questions, he has a problem.

Your classmate, like millions of others, was probably genetically predisposed – not by a single gene but a complex interaction of a number of genes acting in cohesion. His nurture was also permissive; his father relaxed with a six-pack of beer after work. And Mark’s enabling peers started drinking in high school. He fell into the trap of early start like many teenagers but unlike them he was unlucky and succumbed to his genes.

Mark started with beer. “ I don’t do hard liquor, just beer.” He had heard his dad announce in a moral tone many times. So beer was OK. And so was its euphoria and adventure. He drank mostly over the weekends and sometime sipped a beer or two during the week. His liver kept up with his pace; it slogged overtime and manufactured more enzymes to detoxify the poison. The metabolism would convert alcohol into acetaldehyde. Excess of acetaldehyde would flush his skin; give him headache, nausea and stomach pain – a hangover. Another enzyme – acetaldehyde dehydrogenase – would now rush to his rescue by neutralizing accumulated acetaldehyde and relieve him of misery.

Mark, propelled by his dad’s genes and convinced by his morality, did not seek any help. It was just beer, after all. But that did not last long.

Read more »

Monday Poem

Posted on by Jim Culleny

“It's all just one big lie … basically a giant Ponzi scheme.”
—Bernie Madoff

Life in the Fast Lane
Jim Culleny

A crow atop a phone pole
like a cocked hat –a selfsure bird
eyeing a white line lunch
who understands the nuances of traffic
waits, patient as a tick,
until the last ten-wheeler grinds by
then swoops down quick.
Caaa! he says, its mine and
pecking like a capitalist he struts
and feeds and darts, always
with his eye out for a killing car or bus
wary his whole life feasting on
what another, less fastidious in attention,
has provided him to munch.

A Scientist Goes to an Ashram for a Personal Retreat – Part 2

Posted on by Norman Costa

Part 1 of “A Scientist Goes to an Ashram for a Personal Retreat” can be found here:

(Note: I do not use the real names of people, nor do I identify the specific Ashram. I changed a few details. The purpose is to protect the privacy of the individuals. Readers who are familiar with this Ashram will probably recognize it.)

I Make Contact

My first few days at the Ashram were filled with a good deal of uncertainty. Where do I sit in the dining hall? Will I violate some standard of etiquette among people pursuing a serious religious practice? What if I say hello to someone who is spending time in silence? I know I'm going to get a stern look if I upset someone's spiritual practice. My predilection is to do nothing, say nothing, and hope I do not trip over my own feet with a monastic faux pas.

The first evening I walked up to the building that housed the dining hall to make sure I was there at the start of the dinner period. The building is like a visitor center, with a small shop selling books, CDs, DVDs, gifts, and items of religious significance. It also houses the media center. I looked in through the door to the dining area and into a large common area. It's very much like a multipurpose room in a small high school: auditorium, lecture stage, gym, and dining. There was a decent size commercial kitchen , off to one side. Tables were set up for a buffet service. Tables and chairs were arranged around the auditorium. There was a sound proof control room in a corner opposite the stage, and was part of the media center. I could see an access to a patio for eating outside. This is January, so we stay inside. I walked over to the food and toured around the two buffet tables. I was alone and didn't know if I should begin eating or not. I returned to the hall outside the dining area. There were a few people there but no one seemed to organizing themselves for dinner. I went back into the dining room and saw a lone gentleman filling up a plate. I started doing the same. Then it happened. I made my first breach of monastic etiquette. The gentleman politely told me I had to wait for the gong to be sounded, enter with the others, and wait again for a communal prayer to begin the mealtime. He had to be elsewhere and was taking a plate of food so he could make his other appointment.

OK, that wasn't too embarrassing. After a few more minutes about a dozen or two people gathered. An aproned cook opened the door, and sounded a small hand held gong. We filed in and stood together around the food. Someone started a Sanskrit prayer that was sung by everyone. The feeling they projected was communal, happy, relaxed. and enjoying their prayer as a prelude to eating. I was feeling more comfortable. With the end of the singing, the group recited a prayer, in English, the words being in a large framed poster on the wall. Eventually, I learned to follow and recite the prayer, along with a shout of “Ji!” in response to another incantation. It was like an affirmation, an “Amen” if you will, that ended the prayers and gave everyone permission to “dig in.” I was pleasantly surprised at the variety and presentation of the vegan food. In addition to recognizable salad items like greens, tomatoes, broccoli, cauliflower, and carrots, there were all sorts of middle eastern and Indian dishes. Of course there was lots of tofu cooked this way and that way. It all looked very good and it was great tasting, as well.

Not knowing where to sit, I went to a table further out from the food, facing back toward the food and the other diners, and started to enjoy my dinner. I was recognized for what I was, a brand new visitor who didn't know up from down. A woman monastic, Swami Learananda, came over and invited me to sit with her and several others. I met a couple of monastics and visitors like myself. The visitors tended to be friends of the Ashram who come periodically for the spiritual practice and experience. A few were newbies like myself who were referred by others. Swami Learananda said I looked familiar and that we met here before. I told her she looked familiar, and that I met her more than fifteen years before when visiting Giri and Yukteswar. “Of course,” she said. Learananda was wonderful to talk to and made me feel comfortable, relaxed, and very much at ease. She was raving about the homemade bread and organic homemade jam, so I had to try it. It was wonderful. For a few moments I was considering applying for life long study as a Swami-in-training just for daily access to that homemade bread and jam. Although I enjoyed every bit of the plentiful food, I was afraid I would be very hungry between meals. At home I'm frequently hungry between meals, and tend to nosh a lot. Never, not once, did I feel hungry between meals at the Ashram.

Read more »

The Bitter Taste of Life

Posted on by Aditya Dev Sood

Karela-thumb109408 By Aditya Dev Sood

The other evening, Behenji Bua invited us over for dinner, especially to try her new karela dish. It was sublime, setting off taste sensations all round the apperceptive palate. The slightest sweetness, a balanced coping of salt and sour, fullness and complexity, all built around the fundamental bitterness of bitter-gourd, as karela is unfortunately called in English. I’d never liked karela as a child, and adults around me seemed to understand that – it was especially prepared, I recall, for Behenji’s husband, and for other vegetarian connoisseurs in the family, and I don’t think any of us children were even especially encouraged to eat our share of it. It was not a delicacy, but an acquired, perhaps adult taste. Nowadays, I’m sure it is my favorite vegetable, and I’m sure my mindbody and aesthetic sensibility would be poorer for not consuming it at least twice a week.

What is it about bitterness, that allows it to become a part of one’s aesthetic appetite later in life, having been the opposite of pleasure in one’s youth? From when I was a child, I'd always loved raw mango, tamarind, every kind of chat, and even those spicy-salted prunes putatively from Afghanistan. But only recently have I begun to drink Campari-soda by choice, enjoy green vegetables of all kinds, including arugula, kale, colacasia, and seek out those super-hoppy beers that can sting my senses with a burst of pure firstness, as if I were seventeen again, experiencing sushi and wasabi for the first time, learning that warm sake can fumigate the nasal cavity just as wasabi can inflame it. My taste for bitterness is, perhaps, partly founded in the search for novelty, but there is also something else, a transformation of the body's biochemistry in early-middle age, to a new and shifted harmonics of taste.

Over a couple of Christoffels at Bangalore's only Jazz bar a few days ago, I asked my friend Gabriel to help me think about bitterness.

Read more »

Sunday, March 1, 2009

Under the Radar with Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Posted on by S. Abbas Raza

Owen Edwards in Smithsonian Magazine:

Unmanned-aerial-vehicle-Dragon-Eye-388 At the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum (NASM), a display of six unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) demonstrates what happens when the little airplanes of my childhood get serious. Take the five-pound, 45-inch wingspan AeroVironment RQ-14A “Dragon Eye.” Launched by hand, or with a bungee cord, the tiny scout plane is controlled by GPS coordinates entered into its guidance system with a standard laptop computer. Once aloft on its mission—to transmit video images of territory lying ahead of a marine infantry or transport unit—the little scout is completely autonomous.

“The video is received in special eyeglasses worn by one of the two marines who operate the plane,” says NASM curator Dik Daso. “Taking the pilot out of the plane [in reconnaissance missions] has been a concern for a long time,” says Daso, a former Air Force reconnaissance pilot. “All sorts of cosmic stuff can be done when the person is out of the vehicle. You can design things that are really stealthy.”

The pilotless Dragon Eye keeps marines from having to move into what may be hostile territory without knowing what's ahead. Two tiny video cameras in the nose cone—one positioned to look down, the other to look to the side—give an accurate view of what's on the ground, precise enough for mortar fire to be directed at perceived threats.

More here.