Abstract
These mechanical gladiators are powered up and ready to rip
When good robots go bad
When, as a kid, Dan Danknick begged his mom for $100 to build his first robot, he never dreamed that a few decades later his robots would be hauling in prize money for disabling other bots in head-to-head, to-the-death competition. Danknick and his mechanical alter egos compete in the super heavyweight division of BattleBots Inc., a league dedicated to “the sport of robotic competition,” which was launched a year and a half ago by enthusiasts Trey Roski and Greg Munson.
Evolutionary bot-ology: Fighting tooth and nail in the BattleBox
The sport emerged from a culture of “scratch-builders,” people who enjoy puttering around with servos and spare parts, according to Munson. But it's not relegated to basement workshops anymore: This fall, BattleBots goes mainstream with a half-hour series on Comedy Central that premieres August 30. The 13 episodes, filmed during a June competition in San Francisco, feature behind-the-scenes closeups as well as coverage of weigh-ins and bout action.
Viewers can see robotic competitors such as Killer-hurtz and Mauler face off inside a 48-foot-square, booby-trapped arena known as the BattleBox. Science personality Bill Nye provides technical commentary during the shows; comedic twins Randy and Jason Sklar and Baywatch regular Donna D'Errico comprise the rest of the “broadcast” team.
But don't get the wrong idea. BattleBots is not “some kind of geek WWF,” warns Danknick. “It's just a bunch of guys getting together who happen to be moderately clever.”
Make that really clever: Danknick is a physicist-turned-software-engineer, and other participants include a movie special effects designer, a corporate lawyer, and, yes, an actual rocket scientist. In fact, engineering inspiration for the 120-odd robots has come from a wide range of disciplines, from chemistry to metallurgy to noise interference suppression. “It's a great proving ground for technology,” co-founder Munson says.
Especially military technology? Well, maybe in the sense that the robots must be built to function completely reliably, without failing the one time you send them into the ring, says Christian Carlberg, a Disney imagineer whose six-wheeled, 300-pound Minion was a returning champion in the June matchups. “You can't afford to be sloppy.”
Actually, the premise behind Dan Danknick's robot Hazard is that some Battle-Bots contenders are indeed sloppy. “We noticed that robot builders are poor electricians,” Danknick says. So Hazard was designed to hit other bots hard—to “really give them a whack”—and more often than not, their wires would pop loose.
Dan Danknick never did get that hundred bucks from his mother, but of course that didn't stop him. And his real dream? “I'd love to build specialpurpose robots for the FBI, ones designed to accomplish one task, like destructive investigation.” That means ripping holes in the sides of trucks like the one that shut down the interchange of I-15 and I-10 in Los Angeles this past December, when a man threatened to blow up the freeway with explosives he allegedly had in his U-Haul. “If my robot existed,” Danknick says, “the threat of demolishing that interchange would've been abated in one hour instead of eight.”
—Sarah Horowitz
Peter Abrahamson's Ronin is one of 70 robots slugging it out in prime time this fall.
A second chance to make a first impression
Twenty-two thousand schoolkids stream through Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, on field trips each year. They come with a pretty stereotyped idea of what a scientist looks like and what his—or her—job entails.
“We ask them, ‘Do you know what a dentist does?’ and they say, ‘Yes.’ We ask, ‘Well, how do you know?’ and they say, ‘Because we've been to the dentists office,’” says Priscilla Meldrim, the lab's docent coordinator.
“When we ask them, ‘Well, do you know what a scientist does?’ their answers are less sure.”
This standard exchange inspired an art exhibit on Fermilab's fifteenth floor, the only area open to the public (see it online at www-ed.fnal.gov/projects/scientists). “We had a blank construction wall that needed to be covered up,” Meldrim explains. “It just stared people in the face when they got off the west elevator.”
So before a trip to the lab, one junior high school teacher asked one of her classes to draw and describe pictures of typical scientists. “I think of a scientist as very dedicated to his work,” wrote one seventh-grader. “He is kind of crazy, always talking quickly.”
In February, the class went to Fermilab to meet the real scientists. The 31 kids split up into groups that talked to scientists like Debbie Harris, 33, who's working on a neutrino beam experiment. “They seemed curious and friendly,” she remembers. “They wanted to know what my hobbies are, what kind of music I listen to, whether I played sports—they didn't actually ask anything about science.”
Then it was back to the drawing board. After four hours with Fermilab's crew, most of the kids dropped the lab coats and bubbling beakers from their descriptions and instead concluded that scientists are, in the words of one seventh-grader named Katie, “normal people that lead normal lives.”
On the other hand, Katie added that Fermilab scientists “can do whatever they want and they still get paid for it”—which doesn't sound so normal after all.
—S. H.
And the risk of nuclear annihilation is …
The impulse to rid the world of nuclear weapons bubbles up from a different place in each activist's soul, from outrage at the astronomical U.S. military budget to sheer terror of atomic Armagge-don. But over the years, a few men have been trying to replace emotional rationales with mathematical ones.
Bradford Lyttle has devised visual aids for his “apocalypse equation.”
“I was looking for a scientific foundation for pacifism,” remembers Bradford Lyttle, a political activist, when in the early eighties he cooked up a formula he has dubbed the “apocalypse equation” to explain why world nuclear powers should disarm immediately. He says the simple equation (shown in the accompanying photo) proves that the likelihood of nuclear war becomes a near-certainty over time.
Lyttle, founder of the United States Pacifist Party and a three-time presidential candidate, developed the formula in 1982 in the course of working toward a Ph.D. at the University of Chicago. Since then, he has spent almost two decades trying to persuade scientists and policy-makers of its implications. He writes letters to politicians, shows up at rallies with charts, and charms media folk with his curmudgeonly sincerity.
Ike Jeanes, an independent researcher in Virginia, takes a more interactive approach to quantify the risk of nuclear annihilation. In 1997 he wrote a computer program called Nukefix, which can be downloaded for free from www.nukefix.org. The software, he asserts, provides a way to test how certain factors—number of nations with nukes, level of a country's hostility, sheer quantity of missiles—increase or decrease the statistical likelihood of nuclear first use.
Martin Hellman, a retired Stanford professor of electrical engineering, also contends that nuclear war is inevitable. Every day that goes by in which a missile or computer can fail, he says, is like pulling the trigger again and again in a game of Russian roulette: Over time, the likelihood of doing yourself in gets more and more certain.
Lyttle and Jeanes both hope that statistical analysis of what Jeanes terms “the nuclear weapons problem” will pay off in some level of disarmament. But Hellman believes the abolition of nukes is not only useless but actually foolish, and that governments would do best by “making war unthinkable” as a way to solve conflicts.
The three have never met. And it's probably a good thing: Though their calculations reach more or less the same conclusion, they nevertheless gently deride each other's math as “embarrassing,” “not rigorous enough,” and, in one instance, “absolutely wrong.”
—S. H.
Sculpture from scrap
Still holding on to that old Geiger counter from 1950? Don't know what to do with all your nuclear lab scrap? How about making it into art? That's what artist Tom Jennings has done. While plenty of works have tackled the bomb, world peace, and the atomic age, some of his sculpture takes a more literal approach. Consider his Model 23, Trinitite Box, for example. The $3,500 sculpture is powered by a piece of trini-tite—the radioactive rock created from liquefied sand during the Trinity nuclear bomb test.
It is housed in a box that once contained a dew-point measuring device, which Jennings found at a surplus store in Pasadena, California. On the front of the box is a piece of reactor glass through which onlookers can see a tiny landscape made from actual trinitite rocks and soil. A watercolor sky, inset with the window of a Geiger counter, looms in the background.
As cesium 137 in the trinitite decays, beta particles enter the Geiger-Mueller tube and cause small sparks that, in turn, run a servo connected to a strip of film, which can be seen through a viewer. Because the film strip—which contains both historic and personal footage—advances only when the tube picks up a particle, it moves sporadically. “And it's a big, heavy motor,” says friend Erika Wanenmacher, a Santa Fe-based sculptor. “Loud and kind of scary.”
PHOTODISC
Model 23, Trinitite Box “illuminates the ambivalence in things.”
All of Jennings's sculptures are similar: scientific-looking gadgets made of mid-century modern materials like wood, porcelain, brass, and Bakelite, with period switches and knobs. And they really work. “He's an astounding mechanic,” Wanenmacher says.
The “geezer scientist crowd,” says the 44-year-old Jennings, will recognize the aesthetic, but perhaps not the ambivalence of his message. “The atom is neither good nor evil, just a thing you have to manage,” he states. In particular, Model 23, Trinitite Box and Model 47, Trinity Diorama, a $4,500 miniature landscape of the Trinity test site, “conjure up the package deal we were given,” he explains. “On the one hand, there are these amazing, fascinating physics. On the other hand, there are horrible side effects.”
In brief
▪ Natural affinity?
What is it about nuclear power plants that draws large reptiles— alligators and crocodiles—to them? Apparently it's the cooling ponds. On May 26, the Times of London reported that the crocodile population at a farm at Pierrelatte in southern France had recently grown to more than 500. The farm's owners, brothers Luc and Eric Fougeirol, attributed their crocodile-breeding success to the “near tropical” climate created by cooling water from the Tricastin nuclear complex. Similarly, the Waterford 3 nuclear power plant near Baton Rouge, Lousiana, proved to be an attractive residence for one six-foot alligator, who had to be ejected from paradise after she too aggressively defended a nest she had built in the bank of one of the plant's cooling ponds (Associated Press, June 28). With some difficulty, workers evicted the angry gator and transferred her to a swamp near Luling. They also recovered the alligator's eggs, which were shipped to a hatchery at the 84,000-acre Rockefeller Wildlife Refuge where, once hatched, the baby alligators will be released.
▪ Now that's power walking
Nothing is more annoying than having the batteries of your mobile phone give out while you're in transit, says Jim Gilbert, an engineering expert at Hull University. Working with Trevor Baylis, owner of the Electric Shoe Company, Gilbert has come up with a product that makes it possible to stay in touch at all times: shoes that generate enough power to keep a military phone going. (They need about 3 watts when in use.) The BBC reported on June 26 that the British military “has shown a keen interest” in Electric Shoe Company's army boot. The boots, currently undergoing testing in the Namibian desert, could keep British soldiers' phones powered up for about $160 a pair.
▪ Sleepy time Gaul
Alain Dejammet, who was a French representative to the United Nations for four years, apparently made good use of his time during his assignment in New York. Dejammet has recently published a guide to the best places to take a nap in the U.N. building. He rated various locations in the building based on lighting, comfort, and frequency of use (Ronda Iberia, May 2000).
▪ Cutting-edge comedy?
In fall 1992, the Fox TV network launched a controversial half-hour sitcom called Woops. The show—about the madcap life of a post-nuclear family living in a post-nuclear holocaust world—stretched the boundaries of what had previously been considered suitable comic material. But its ratings were poor and it was taken off the air within weeks. In fall 1998, UPN attempted to enlarge comedy's horizons with The Diary of Desmond Pfeiffer, set in Abraham Lincoln's White House, based in part on the premise that jokes about slavery could be a barrel of laughs. It suffered a barrage of criticism and a similar death by early cancellation. Now German television is trying its hand at path-breaking humor— with a show titled Goebbels und Geduldig, about the Third Reich's Joseph Goebbels and his Jewish doppelganger (Newsweek, June 12). The premise: Geduldig, a wacky Jew, escapes from a concentration camp, trades places with the propaganda minister, and hilarious complications ensue…. Or maybe not.
▪ No hiding from the silverware
The Journal of Environmental Radioactivity (vol. 50) has published 22 independent assessments of the release of radioactivity during last year's accident at Japan's Tokaimura uranium fuel plant. Ignoring the scanty “official” measures of radiation levels, independent experts tested coins, silverware, jewelry, and even food from houses near the plant. One reading—of a gold necklace worn by a woman who worked more than a kilometer away—was inexplicably 30 times higher than it should have been, writes New Scientist reporter Rob Edwards (May 20). It turns out that, although an evacuation order had been issued, the woman “returned twice to her house 350 meters from the plant to feed her dogs.”
▪ Truth in advertising?
Shortly before the unsuccessful July 7 test of a U.S. national missile defense interceptor, Boeing began a pro-missile defense advertising campaign designed, the company said, to “educate” the public about “the technology and how it works.” Critics contended that education had nothing to do with it—that the ad campaign was initiated instead in an attempt to squelch the many questions experts had raised about whether the technology would work (Washington Post, June 16).
▪ Not dead yet
Before Brookhaven National Laboratory's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (the RHIC) began smashing bits of gold together at previously unheard-of speeds, critics said scien-tists—who were trying to create a plasma that resembled the state of matter thought to exist just before the “Big Bang”—might instead create a giant black hole (see September/October 1999 “Bulletins”). The RHIC was switched on in June, however, and just as analysts who said it was not powerful enough to create a black hole predicted, not even Long Island has been swallowed up. Critics can now turn to worrying about CERN's “A Large Ion Collider Experiment” (ALICE), which is supposed to be ready to go in 2005. It is expected to be 30 times faster than the RHIC.
Not that activists applaud Jennings, either. “I get so pissed at these anti-nuke people,” he fumes. “I want to say, ‘Look, there's beauty in this stuff.’” Yet Jennings is no hawk, pointing out that atomic power was unleashed on the world with no long-term view. “Clearly,” he says of its apologists, “they were lying to us.”
—S. H.
Sarah Horowitz is a Chicago freelancer.
My platform can beat your platform
As the Republicans and Democrats gathered in August to nominate as presidential candidates George W. Bush and Al Gore, Jr., the <i>Bulletin </i> took a look at the party platforms to see what they said about nuclear weapons.
Can you guess which party said what?
“[The] president will reevaluate America's nuclear force posture and pursue the lowest possible number consistent with our national security. We can safely eliminate thousands more of these horrific weapons. We should do so….
“The premises of Cold War targeting should no longer dictate the size of the U.S. nuclear arsenal…. In addition, the United States should work with other nuclear nations to remove as many weapons as possible from high-alert, hair-trigger status … to reduce the risks of accidental or unauthorized launch.
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WEB Watch
Under the sea
The Net is all about eliminating intermediaries. Stock without brokers. Groceries without grocery stores. Insurance without slime. And now you can watch the world's great polluters without the nightly news.
A recent example was in June, when Greenpeace set up a web cam 100 feet below the ocean's surface so delegates to the Oslo-Paris Commission (ospar) could watch live images of liquid waste, laced with radioactivity, being discharged from the La Hague plutonium reprocessing plant off the Normandy coast. Ospar is the intergovernmental organization that regulates marine pollution in the northeast Atlantic.
In July 1998 Greenpeace revealed that Cogema, which operates France's La Hague facility, had installed faulty equipment and was discharging the radioactive soup near a public beach. The discharge pipe was discovered only after an unusually low tide left it exposed.
Fast forward to the June OSPAR meeting in Copenhagen where delegates were voting to ban all dumping of radioactive waste into the sea. (In 1993 dumping of radioactive wastes at sea was banned by a United Nations treaty, but discharging wastes from land-based pipelines was not covered.)
Throughout the meeting, Greenpeace broadcast images of the discharge pipe over the Internet and at the meeting. Two days after the web cam was set up, however, Cogema divers “accidentally” cut the link, but not before ministers from 12 of 14 member countries, with France and Britain abstaining, decided against the practice of radioactive dumping in the ocean.
Cogema continues to broadcast live web images from its own network of 10 cameras (www.cogema.com), but still absent are any pictures from the discharge site off the Normandy coast.
Zapped by zip code
Ever wonder what nuclear missiles might be aimed at your quiet suburb? Or the minimum safe distance from some pesky nearby blast?
Enter any U.S. zip code into “The Annihilation Calculator,” www.protectameri-cansnow.com, and it will return not only the countries that can lob a nuke in that direction, but also the missiles' names and yields. Fun and games aside, there are some problems. The Coalition to Protect Americans Now, the page's sponsor, lists countries such as India, Pakistan, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, and Syria as nuclear threats, despite the fact that none of these countries possess a weaponized “nuclear capability,” if any at all. The second problem is one of omission: Nuclear-armed friends of the United States— France, Israel, and Britain—have just been omitted.
The site has a secondary agenda. When users enter their zip codes, the Coalition's search engine looks up their local congressional representative and provides a handy link for sending the “right” message—one in support of a national missile defense system, one assumes.
You can also turn to PBS's “Race for the Superbomb” page (part of its “American Experience” documentary series, at www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/bomb/sfeature/mapablast.html) where you can calculate your chances of surviving a local nuclear blast. Enter a zip code, choose a blast size (one or 25 megaton), and hit the “detonate” button.
Concentric circles show ground-level pressure gradients, and a handy legend describes what the numbers mean, including the chance of survival and damage to buildings. An additional feature calculates fallout based on user-input weather data.
—Bret Lortie
Bret Lortie is the managing editor of the Bulletin.