Now That's a Landing!

It's a little late for Memorial Day but I just ran across this thread from The Cellar's Image of the Day from just over a year ago which shows some pretty amazing pictures of giant helicopters hovering precariously on mountaintops picking up troops and couldn't help but think about our recent holiday.

Map The Fallen

Here's a rather sobering piece of software for Memorial Day. Map the Fallen is a Google Earth plug-in which displays an interactive map of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Trying the timeline which begins in October 2001, you can see little yellow symbols fill the screen as more soldiers are killed over time. Linking the soldier's home town to his or her place of death, it makes allows you to "fly" from one place to the other. It also shows how international the war has become showing European soldiers who've been killed in the war. It gives a pretty sobering perspective to the politicians who chatter about the war in abstract terms on the Sunday morning chat shows.

Robots Go To War

I found this TED Talk particularly compelling. Part of it is probably just withdrawal from the end of Battlestar Galactica. Since the presenter talks about modern-day battlefield robots, it's easy to imagine these machines becoming more and more like the Cylon "toasters" in the future. Beyond the sci-fi becoming reality angle, the talk goes into some very interesting issues of how people react to the use of war robots. When the warriors are expendable, they are more likely to be used to wage war. Perhaps the most disturbing part of the talk, is the quote from an official who fells that there is no moral quandary with the use of robots on the battlefield, "unless they kill the wrong people. Then, it's a product recall issue."