The Roots Of White Anxiety

Monday, July 26th, 2010

Ross Douthat explores the roots of white anxiety:

Last year, two Princeton sociologists, Thomas Espenshade and Alexandria Walton Radford, published a book-length study of admissions and affirmative action at eight highly selective colleges and universities. Unsurprisingly, they found that the admissions process seemed to favor black and Hispanic applicants, while whites and Asians needed higher grades and SAT scores to get in. But what was striking, as Russell K. Nieli pointed out last week on the conservative Web site Minding the Campus, was which whites were most disadvantaged by the process: the downscale, the rural and the working-class.

This was particularly pronounced among the private colleges in the study. For minority applicants, the lower a family’s socioeconomic position, the more likely the student was to be admitted. For whites, though, it was the reverse. An upper-middle-class white applicant was three times more likely to be admitted than a lower-class white with similar qualifications.

This may be a money-saving tactic. In a footnote, Espenshade and Radford suggest that these institutions, conscious of their mandate to be multiethnic, may reserve their financial aid dollars “for students who will help them look good on their numbers of minority students,” leaving little room to admit financially strapped whites.

But cultural biases seem to be at work as well. Nieli highlights one of the study’s more remarkable findings: while most extracurricular activities increase your odds of admission to an elite school, holding a leadership role or winning awards in organizations like high school R.O.T.C., 4-H clubs and Future Farmers of America actually works against your chances. Consciously or unconsciously, the gatekeepers of elite education seem to incline against candidates who seem too stereotypically rural or right-wing or “Red America.”

This provides statistical confirmation for what alumni of highly selective universities already know. The most underrepresented groups on elite campuses often aren’t racial minorities; they’re working-class whites (and white Christians in particular) from conservative states and regions. Inevitably, the same underrepresentation persists in the elite professional ranks these campuses feed into: in law and philanthropy, finance and academia, the media and the arts.

(Hat tip to Steve Sailer.)

Posted in Education, Policy | 5 Comments »

Full of Brio and Spin

Monday, July 26th, 2010

Claire Cain Miller of the New York Times describes Elon Musk as full of brio and spin:

“He’s done amazing things, but at the same time, he’s not a straight-shooter,” says Darryl Siry, Tesla’s former senior vice president for sales and marketing. “It’s a reality distortion field and it’s a powerful one. He gives the facts to fit the narrative he wants out there.”

When your sales & marketing guy is uncomfortable with how far you stretch the truth, well, you’re probably taking things too far.

Tesla isn’t making money, and it’s not clear when it’s going to start:

In 2009, Tesla lost $55.7 million on revenue of just $111.9 million. It faces a period without significant sales revenue because it plans to stop selling the current version of the Roadster in 2011 and will not start selling the next generation until at least a year after the Model S is out.

Elon’s brother, Kimbal, calls him the double-down king:

In addition to his Tesla investment, Mr. Musk says he has funneled $100 million into SpaceX and $10 million into SolarCity; the total of $185 million is nearly all his proceeds from the sale of PayPal to eBay. (He sold $24 million worth of his Tesla stock, in part, he says, because he recently ran out of cash.)

Posted in Business | No Comments »

Dangers of National Repentance

Monday, July 26th, 2010

C.S. Lewis’s essay on the Dangers of National Repentance, which appears in the collection The Grand Miracle, examines the then-fashionable movement to “repent” England’s sins and to “forgive” England’s enemies:

Young Christians especially… are turning to it in large numbers. They are ready to believe that England bears part of the guilt for the present war, and ready to admit their own share in the guilt of England… Most of these young men were children… when England made many of those decisions to which the present disorders could plausibly be traced. Are they, perhaps, repenting what they have in no sense done?

If they are, it might be supposed that their error is very harmless: men fail so often to repent their real sins that the occasional repentance of an imaginary sin might appear almost desirable. But what actually happens (I have watched it happen) to the youthful national penitent is a little more complicated than that. England is not a natural agent, but a civil society… The young man who is called upon to repent of England’s foreign policy is really being called upon to repent the acts of his neighbor; for a foreign secretary or a cabinet minister is certainly a neighbor… A group of such young penitents will say, “Let us repent our national sins”; what they mean is, “Let us attribute to our neighbor (even our Christian neighbor) in the cabinet, whenever we disagree with him, every abominable motive that Satan can suggest to our fancy.”

The explicitly Christian language disguises how little has really changed:

All Christians know that they must forgive their enemies. But “my enemy” primarily means the man whom I am really tempted to hate… If you listen to young Christian intellectuals talking, you will soon find out who their real enemy is. He seems to have two names — Colonel Blimp and “the businessman.” I suspect that the latter usually means the speaker’s father, but that is speculation. What is certain is that in asking such people to forgive the Germans and Russians, and to open their eyes to the sins of England, you are asking them, not to mortify, but to indulge, their ruling passion.

David Foster calls this passage the two-by-four, right between the eyes:

The communal sins of which they should be told to repent are those of their own age and class — its contempt for the uneducated, its readiness to suspect evil, its self-righteous provocations of public obloquy, its breaches of the Fifth Commandment.

David Foster’s take is that “liberal guilt” is a myth:

Many “progressives”… have uncritically and without reflection adopted the ideas and values of “their own age and class” — and, while doing so, they have congratulated themselves on their courage and independence of thought. Thus, they can enjoy a great feeling of righteousness without running the risk of condemnation by those whose opinions really matter to them.

Posted in Policy | No Comments »

The Stiff-Arm

Sunday, July 25th, 2010

One of the most popular beginner judo techniques is the stiff-arm:

You get a grip on the opponent’s gi and lock your arms out straight in order to hold them off of you and prevent them from entering for a throw.

Problem is, even though stiff-arming may make it somewhat harder for the other guy to enter for a throw, it just about absolutely prevents you from doing any judo either. So long as you are stiffarming, neither guy can do good judo. You might not get thrown but you’ll never throw them either. This makes it a pretty crude tactic.

It is also a beginner trick because when we first start randori, everyone comes up with the bright idea of stiff-arming. It doesn’t have to be taught, beginners just do it. Also, a lot of beginner class time is taken up trying to show folks how to get around the other guy’s stiff-arms.

It is a beginner’s mistake, but it is a really hard habit to break, Rory Miller notes, because it works:

It occurred to me this morning that when a beginner stiff-arms and blocks a throw, it is a bad habit. Poor judo. When a skilled practitioner blocks the same throw in the same way it is “good structure.”

When a white-belt stiff-arms, it’s bad judo. When a black-belt stiff-arms, it’s good structure. I’m reminded of the SNL sexual harassment training film, starring Tom Brady:

In this case, the advice to be a black-belt is not the same as the facetious advice to be handsome. The skilled grappler is using the stiff-arm to shut down an attack he didn’t quite anticipate, so he can come back with a counter or just return to square one. The unskilled grappler is using the stiff-arm to delay the inevitable — all the while, tiring himself out and learning very, very little.

Settling in for trench warfare is a terrible strategy, but taking up a fortified position is often an excellent tactic.

Posted in Martial Arts | No Comments »

Diversity and the Myth of White Privilege

Sunday, July 25th, 2010

Senator James Webb (D-VA) has an opinion piece in the Journal on Diversity and the Myth of White Privilege:

Those who came to this country in recent decades from Asia, Latin America and Africa did not suffer discrimination from our government, and in fact have frequently been the beneficiaries of special government programs. The same cannot be said of many hard-working white Americans, including those whose roots in America go back more than 200 years.

Contrary to assumptions in the law, white America is hardly a monolith. And the journey of white American cultures is so diverse (yes) that one strains to find the logic that could lump them together for the purpose of public policy.

The clearest example of today’s misguided policies comes from examining the history of the American South.

The old South was a three-tiered society, with blacks and hard-put whites both dominated by white elites who manipulated racial tensions in order to retain power. At the height of slavery, in 1860, less than 5% of whites in the South owned slaves. The eminent black historian John Hope Franklin wrote that “fully three-fourths of the white people in the South had neither slaves nor an immediate economic interest in the maintenance of slavery.”

The Civil War devastated the South, in human and economic terms. And from post-Civil War Reconstruction to the beginning of World War II, the region was a ravaged place, affecting black and white alike.

In 1938, President Franklin Roosevelt created a national commission to study what he termed “the long and ironic history of the despoiling of this truly American section.” At that time, most industries in the South were owned by companies outside the region. Of the South’s 1.8 million sharecroppers, 1.2 million were white (a mirror of the population, which was 71% white). The illiteracy rate was five times that of the North-Central states and more than twice that of New England and the Middle Atlantic (despite the waves of European immigrants then flowing to those regions). The total endowments of all the colleges and universities in the South were less than the endowments of Harvard and Yale alone. The average schoolchild in the South had $25 a year spent on his or her education, compared to $141 for children in New York.

Generations of such deficiencies do not disappear overnight, and they affect the momentum of a culture. In 1974, a National Opinion Research Center (NORC) study of white ethnic groups showed that white Baptists nationwide averaged only 10.7 years of education, a level almost identical to blacks’ average of 10.6 years, and well below that of most other white groups. A recent NORC Social Survey of white adults born after World War II showed that in the years 1980-2000, only 18.4% of white Baptists and 21.8% of Irish Protestants — the principal ethnic group that settled the South — had obtained college degrees, compared to a national average of 30.1%, a Jewish average of 73.3%, and an average among those of Chinese and Indian descent of 61.9%.

Policy makers ignored such disparities within America’s white cultures when, in advancing minority diversity programs, they treated whites as a fungible monolith. Also lost on these policy makers were the differences in economic and educational attainment among nonwhite cultures. Thus nonwhite groups received special consideration in a wide variety of areas including business startups, academic admissions, job promotions and lucrative government contracts.

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Grand Strategies

Saturday, July 24th, 2010

In Grand Strategies, former diplomat and Yale professor Charles Hill argues that the quality and skill of foreign policy have deteriorated as the classical education has been displaced by the social and behavioral sciences.

Hill discusses his book on Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson. The interview is in five chapters: 1 2 3 4 5.

NerveAgent calls it good reading and shares these excerpts:

Of all the arts and sciences, only literature is substantially and methodologically unbounded. Literature’s freedom to explore endless or exquisite details, portray the thoughts of imaginary characters, and dramatize large themes through intricate plots brings it closest to the reality of “how the world really works.” This dimension of fiction is indispensible to the strategist who cannot, by the nature of the craft, know all of the facts, considerations, and potential consequences of a situation at the time a decision must be made, ready or not. Literature lives in the realm strategy requires, beyond rational calculations, in acts of the imagination. (p. 6)

To be more specific about why literary insight is essential for statecraft, both endeavors are concerned with important questions that are only partly accessible to rational thought. Such matters as how a people begins to identify itself as a nation, the nature of trust between political actors or between a government and its people, how a nation commits itself to a more humane course of governance — all these and many more topics dealt with in this book — can’t be understood without some “grasp of the ungraspable” emotional and moral weight they bear. A purely rational or technocratic approach is likely to lead one astray. (p. 7)

Posted in Education, Policy | 2 Comments »

Drugs, Death, Censorship, and Singapore

Friday, July 23rd, 2010

Bryan Caplan is indignant that Singapore executes drug dealers and censors “those who expose the ghoulish practice” — but some of the comments paint a different picture:

The Singapore government considers itself as having a “right of reply” to commentary about it. This is fairly fundamental to the system and is not likely to change.

Shadrake would probably not have been arrested had activists not helped him organize the launch; this would have been interpreted as an attempt to politicize an issue outside of permitted arenas of discussion (i.e., those where the government can reply promptly).

There are tons of books that sharply criticize the ruling party; you can even find them in the government-run public libraries. Singapore does not bother attempting thought control. But it does worry about political organization, and thus the authors and publishers know enough not to risk being ‘political’.

Incidentally, Shadrake has been released on bail and charged with contempt of court and (of course) criminal defamation.

Caplan is also indignant about the tiny city-state’s policy of mandatory military service — which leaves open the question of just how they’d field an army otherwise.

Posted in Policy, Singapore | No Comments »

The Vietnamese Alphabet

Friday, July 23rd, 2010

One reason I found Hilaire du Berrier’s Background to Betrayal dry and somewhat confusing is that it describes many ministers of government with strange names. Vietnamese names, written in the Vietnamese alphabet, are indeed quite strange to American English-speakers — but once you know the basics, it becomes much, much easier to “pronounce” Vietnamese in your head as you read along.

First, it helps to know that the Vietnamese alphabet — that is, how the Vietnamese use the Roman alphabet — is not based on French, as you might suppose, but on Portuguese, the language of early traders and Catholic missionaries. So the pronunciation of, say, Dien Bien Phu is pretty straightforward, and you can ignore your high-school French lessons, which might lead you to drop those trailing ns and to nasalize the preceding es.

Not everything is so straightforward for English-speakers though. Anyone who went to school with Vietnamese classmates knows that the Vietnamese name is Nguyen, and it is not pronounced nuh-GOO-yen. It’s much closer to nwin. That’s because ng is a common digraph in Vietnamese; those two letters together represent the single sound at the end of sing or in the middle of singer — but the Vietnamese use that sound at the beginning of many words, which we don’t do.

Another common digraph is nh, which makes sense if you know any Portuguese, because that’s the Portuguese way of writing ñ (Spanish) or gn (French, Italian). So the Minh in Ho Chi Minh is more like the mign in filet mignon.

The digraph ch is usually pronounced as in English; sometimes it’s just a hard c. The digraph kh is pronounced like ch in German. The digraph ph is pronounced as in English, like f. (I’m not sure why they don’t use f.)

The digraph th is — surprise! — not really a digraph the way it is in English; it’s pronounced like a t followed by an h; it is not pronounced as in thigh or thy.

Once you know the digraphs, you’re pretty safe, because most of the consonants are otherwise pronounced more or less as in English — but there are a few exceptions. For instance, Vietnamese has two forms of d, one which does sound like our d, but with a glottal stop in front of it, and one that sounds like either a z, in the northern dialect, or an English y, in the southern dialect. So Bao Dai sounds like bow die, with no surprises, but Ngo Dinh Diem sounds like no din yee-em; the second d sounds like a y.

In English, we soften a g in front of an e or i. In Vietnamese, they do the same, but it becomes a z, not a j. So Giap is zap.

In Vietnamese, an x is simply an s. An actual s can be either an s or an sh, depending on dialect.

As for all the accents, or diacritics, ignore them — unless you already speak a tonal language, like some form of Chinese. You have very little hope of learning tones by reading an article on the Net.

Anyway, I hope this explanation makes some strange names a bit less strange to you.

Posted in Hilaire du Berrier, Linguistics | 4 Comments »

Not Worth the Effort

Thursday, July 22nd, 2010

When I first started reading Hilaire du Berrier’s Background to Betrayal, which describes the situation in Vietnam leading up to the war, I found it dry and somewhat confusing, and I was even considering putting the book down — and then I came to this passage:

If the reader’s head is swimming as he peruses the descriptions of these ministers of government with their strange names, let him pause for a moment before he puts the whole confusing business out of his mind as not worth the effort. For that is just what the men to whom American conservatives looked for information did for nine long years, while South Vietnam rotted.

One of the most respected columnists in Washington refused to look into the Vietnam picture. “America isn’t interested in what is happening out there,” he protested. It was not true. America was devouring an ocean of newsprint on South Vietnam — tripe put out by the United States Information Service, the State Department, and the most despicable high-pressure public relations campaign ever put over on a civilized nation. But the men and publishers to whom thinking Americans looked for sound information would not make the mental effort to familiarize themselves with the area and its leaders so they could do an intelligent report.

As du Berrier explains it, South Vietnam rapidly devolved into a police state after the French were forced out — which FDR and Stalin had agreed to — as the new leadership focused its efforts on wiping out any competition for power — and US dollars — from other anti-Communist factions. Those ministers of government with strange names are just a tiny piece of the puzzle, which involves French socialist politicians, American university professors, journalists, and international socialist NGOs — oh, and gullible American politicians, of course.

Posted in Hilaire du Berrier, Policy | No Comments »

The Meanest Fighter of All Time

Wednesday, July 21st, 2010

Details magazine interviews the new, mature, vegan Mike Tyson — but he clearly remembers his past:

Details: Your opponents always seemed to weaken before the opening bell. Proud fighters in peak condition—Trevor Berbick, Michael Spinks, Donovan “Razor” Ruddock, Frank Bruno, even Larry Holmes—just seemed to get smaller the moment they made eye contact with you. It was like witchcraft.

Mike Tyson: No doubt about it. Intimidation is crucial to the art of warfare, and it’s totally legit. It’s allowed to be used. It must be used.

Details: But how did you do it? All these guys had spent lifetimes thriving on that same intimidation.

Mike Tyson: I just had to believe it. And if I didn’t, I just had to make myself believe it.

Details: Believe what?

Mike Tyson: That I had to kill this man. And you can’t fake it, not even one tenth of one hundredth percent. You have to believe it so strongly that you can impose that belief, that will, on him. And that’s another realm altogether.

Details: Because every fighter has to have that same will, that same need, that same drive… to impose their will on another man.

Mike Tyson: Every fighter in the history of fighting. But none like me. And, believe me, I’m not being immodest. None like me. I studied every fighter in history, at my manager’s house up in Catskill, ’cause he had all the greatest fights on film, he had every last one of them, and I watched them all, every night. They were all so vicious, man. Jake LaMotta, Henry Armstrong, Carmen Basilio. Sugar Ray — God, he was vicious. But Jack Dempsey more than anyone. All these guys let you know they wanted to murder you, and they’d take shots from you, over and over and over, get beat senseless, just so they could get theirs in. Sugar Ray maybe most of all. But Jack Dempsey? He wanted to maim you. He didn’t want you dead. He wanted you to suffer. He wanted to shatter your eye socket, destroy your cheeks, your chinbone. That’s what I learned from Mr. Dempsey, and I believe I learned it well.

Details: And what did you learn from Mr. Ali?

Mike Tyson: Believe it or not, with all that poetry and the butterflies, what I learned from Ali was meanness. He was the meanest fighter of all time. He’d be in there with Foreman, hardest puncher of all time, he’d be in there with Frazier, another hardest puncher, and he’d be taking it, boom, getting pounded, and then he’d turn, when it was his time, and you’d look at that face, and he’s screaming. [Does an Ali impression] “I’m not [Throws a punch] scared [Throws a punch] of you, you fucking faggot. [Throws two punches] You fucking punk. I’m fucking God, and worship me. I’m the greatest. [Throws two punches] You’re a little fucking boy, cocksucker.” Nobody at ringside reported it, but nobody shit-talked like Ali.

Posted in Martial Arts | No Comments »

This has always been a nation of builders

Wednesday, July 21st, 2010

This is a powerful ad; I want to believe it:

I can’t imagine that images of heavy industry and construction and call-outs to cotton gins, Colt revolvers, and war-time Jeeps play well on the coasts though.

(Hat tip to Cameron Schaefer.)

Posted in Business, Policy, Technology | 8 Comments »

Adventures in Very Recent Evolution

Wednesday, July 21st, 2010

Steve Sailer reviews Nicholas Wade’s recent New York Times science column, Adventures in Very Recent Evolution — but first he introduces it with this preamble:

Sometimes I get discouraged when I realize that I’ve been debunking dumb ideas for many years now, yet dumb ideas remains wildly popular.

But think how Nicholas Wade, the genetics correspondent of the New York Times, must feel. He has the top soapbox in the world for educating the public, the New York Times, and he covers for the NYT the trendiest topic in science, genetics. He has spent the last decade (here are VDARE articles I wrote praising Wade’s NYT work in 2003 and 2006) diligently debunking the reigning dumb ideas of our age, such as “Race doesn’t exist,” “Race is just skin deep,” and “Racial differences couldn’t have evolved because there hasn’t been enough time.” For nine or ten years, he has used dozens of New York Times articles to aim a firehose of the latest scientific findings at these dogmas… and, as far as I can tell, nobody ever notices.

They don’t Watson him. I’ve never noticed anybody objecting to Wade. They just don’t ever get what he’s saying. It doesn’t register. The conventional wisdom is so comforting and so status-raising that relentless reporting in the New York Times can’t dent it, or even make most NYT readers notice that their favorite beliefs are being subverted. Wade has been engaging in Popperian falsification of the age’s dominant theories, and nobody notices.

Posted in Policy, Science | No Comments »

Just How Dangerous Is Police Work?

Wednesday, July 21st, 2010

I was recently chatting with an ex-cop who got out soon after a classmate of his from the academy took a bullet through the arm-hole of his body armor — from an accidental discharge of his partner’s .45 — and died. The job was mostly hours of mind-numbing boredom, interspersed with a few moments of absolute terror. So, just how dangerous is police work?

Generally, police are about three times as likely to be killed on the job as the average American. It isn’t among the top ten most dangerous professions, falling well behind logging, fishing, driving a cab, trash collecting, farming, and truck driving. Moreover, about half of police killed on the job are killed in traffic accidents, and most of those are not while in pursuit of a criminal or rushing to the scene of a crime.
[...]
So take out traffic accidents and other non-violent deaths, and you’re left with 69 officers killed on the job by criminals last year. That’s out of about 850,000 officers nationwide. That breaks down to about 8 deaths per 100,000 officers, or less than twice the national average of on-the-job fatalities.

(Hat tip to TGGP.)

Posted in Crime, War | No Comments »

The Cocaine Coast

Tuesday, July 20th, 2010

Marco Vernaschi describes the “political violence” in Guinea-Bissau, Africa’s Cocaine Coast:

A frantic voice came over the radio: a blast had just destroyed Guinea-Bissau’s military headquarters. I drove toward the compound and, when I arrived, everyone was still shouting and running through the smoking ruins of the building. Bissau’s only ambulance was shuttling back and forth from the hospital, ferrying the bodies of victims. All that four heavily armed soldiers would tell me was that General Batista Tagme Na Wai, head of the army, had just been assassinated.

At six o’clock the next morning, my friend and informant, Vladimir, a reliable security man who worked at my hotel, came to tell me that President Joao Bernardo Vieira had just been killed, too. I asked how he knew, but he simply shook his head. When I pulled up at the president’s house, soldiers were shooting in the air and swinging machetes to keep a crowd of people away. The president’s armored Hummer was still parked out front, the tires flat and its bulletproof windows shattered. The police cars from his escort were destroyed. A rocket shot from a bazooka had penetrated four walls of his house, ending up in the living room. After ruling Guinea-Bissau for nearly a quarter of a century, Vieira, known to his people simply as Nino, was dead.

In just nine hours Guinea-Bissau had lost both its president and the head of its army. Why such violence? Was this double assassination the result of an old rivalry between Vieira and Tagme, or was it something more? The army’s spokesman, Zamora Induta, declared that the president had been killed by a group of renegade soldiers and that assailants had used a bomb to assassinate General Tagme. He said there was no connection between the two deaths. Of course, nobody believed this. Since 2007, Guinea-Bissau, a former Portuguese colony and one of the poorest nations in the world, has become the new hub for cocaine trafficking. The drug is shipped from Venezuela, Colombia, and Brazil to West Africa en route to Europe. Everyone suspected that these assassinations were somehow linked to drug trafficking.

I headed back to the military headquarters. After taking some pictures of the destroyed building, I sneaked out of the generals’ view and made my way to a backyard where some soldiers were resting, sipping tea under a big tree. I offered cigarettes and was given tea in return. Paul—the chief of a special commando unit from the region of Mansoa — told me they had had a hell of night. I thought he was referring to the general situation, but then he told me that he and his men had been sent to the president’s house the night before. It had been their job to kill him. Paul wore a denim cowboy hat and two cartridge belts across his body, in perfect Rambo style. It was noon, the sun higher than ever, but a chill ran through me.

“We went to the house, to question Nino about the bomb that killed Tagme Na Wai,” Paul told me in French. “When we arrived he was trying to flee with his wife, so we forced them to stay. When we asked if he issued the order to kill Tagme, he first denied his responsibility but then confessed. He said he bought the bomb during his last trip to France and ordered that it be placed under the staircase, by Tagme’s office. He didn’t want to give the names of those who brought the bomb here, or the name of the person who placed it.”

Something about the quality of the details, the casual authority of Paul’s voice, convinced me he was telling the truth.

“You know, Nino was a brave man but this time he really did something wrong. So we had to kill him. After all, he killed Tagme and made our life impossible… We have not received our salary since six months ago.”

“So, what happened after you questioned him?” I asked.

“Well, after that we shot him and then we took his powers away.”

I asked what he meant.

“Nino had some special powers,” Paul explained. “We needed to make sure he won’t come back for revenge. So we hacked his body with a machete — the hands, the arms, the legs, his belly, and his head. Now he’s really dead.”

Paul erupted in a smoky chuckle, joined by his men. I scanned the laughing soldiers and saw that three had blood spattered on their boots and pants.

Posted in Crime, War | No Comments »

Lockheed Using Gravity to Spot Subterranean Threats

Tuesday, July 20th, 2010

DARPA is known for out-there technologies. Now it has awarded Lockheed a contract to develop aerial vehicles that detect anomalous gravity signatures:

Lockheed Martin has received a $4.8 million, 12-month contract to create a prototype sensor that spots, categorizes and maps man-made facilities concealed underground. And does it all from the safety of the sky, embedded in a drone and linked to cameras that’d stream the data in real-time.

Pentagon blue sky R&D arm, Darpa, is behind this one. Last year, the agency’s Gravity Anomaly for Tunnel Exposure (GATE) program sought proposals for a system that used a gradiometer to measure miniscule variations in the pull of gravity. Those variations detect differences in the earth’s density, indicating underground space. And the sensors would even be attuned enough to “discriminate a man-made void from naturally-occurring features such as topography and geology,” according to Lockheed’s press release.

I’d think it would be hard enough to detect a mountain from its gravity signature.

Posted in Technology, War | No Comments »

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