Parkour Dog

Five-O

Friday night downtown

To Westerpark

We got a brief sunbreak at 4:30 so I headed out for my exercise walk, since I've done basically nothing since coming hold with a cold on Monday morning, thought I'd try to help sweat it out.  The route from my apartment:

Up this street

Over that bridge and up that street

Over another bridge

Across that intersection

Westerpark

Very dog-friendly park, there's a big off-leash area

The dirt path leads to the off-leash section

Miles of trail through wetlands

I think I saw this in 'Logan's Run'

Little guy in red said 'hi' and then started following me, making mom retrieve him

Various waterfowl

On the way back home

Too Fast to Follow

The US military lost contact with an unmanned hypersonic test aircraft shortly after its launch, defence officials have said.

The Falcon Hypersonic Test Vehicle 2 (HTV-2) - capable of reaching any target in the world in less than an hour - began a test flight from atop a rocket on Thursday.

Contact was also lost with a similar craft during the first mission.

The HTV-2 is designed to travel at 13,000mph (21,000km/h).

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa), which is funding the HTV-2 programme and overseeing the tests, said the small craft was capable of reaching speeds of Mach 20.

The aircraft took off using a Minotaur IV rocket from Vanderberg Air Force Base in California early on Thursday.

Engineers programmed the HTV-2 to launch from the edge of space, separate from its rocket and crash into the ocean.

No information was available on whether the goals of the mission were achieved.

It's not sharks with frickin' laser beams, but ...

... pretty cool regardless:

Modern militaries depend on fuel. Nearly 80 percent of the supplies delivered to operations in Iraq and Afghanistan consist of fuel, and it's no surprise that those military convoys are frequently the targets of insurgents.

"Do you know how many people have died delivering gasoline?" said Tom Nugent, president and co-founder of LaserMotive, a Kent, Wash.-based company looking to replace fossil fuels with laser power.

The answer to Nugent's question? Nearly 1,000 soldiers in the last decade. And that's why Nugent wants to drastically reduce the need for delivering fossil fuels. His company's approach could save lives.

It starts with a machine able to emit a beam of laser light. The beam is different from the lasers used in pointers and industrial applications. It's wide -- about 8 inches wide as it leaves the transmitter -- and then spreads wider as it travels. The beam emitter is located at a ground-based unit and operated by a person, who could control it from the same location or remotely from an entirely different place altogether.

The operator uses the machine to fire the laser beam at a photovoltaic collector located on an unmanned autonomous vehicle (UAV), small plane or helicopter. The current range of the system is about a kilometer.

By the time the beam reaches the collector on board the UAV, it's still about 10 times as intense as sunlight, although human eyes can't see it since its wavelength is deep red to near-infrared. The power levels are in the hundreds of watts to kilowatt range -- definitely hot, but not deadly at the range where it hits the plane.

When the laser hits the photovoltaic device, the photons in the light beam are converted to electricity in the same way that solar cells convert sunlight into electricity. But because the laser beam is comprised of a single wavelength of light, the conversion to electricity is much more efficient than converting multiple wavelengths of sunlight to energy.
The photons become electricity and the energy needed to fly the AUV.

Awww ...

3-week old Sand Cat (Felis margarita) near Tel Aviv, Israel.

Speed Bump Installation, Amsterdam Style

As documented in an earlier post, street work began beneath my window at 7 this morning, and it turns out that what they were installing was one of the large, gently sloped speed bumps you see on many streets in the historic center.  They got this done between 7 and noon ... I suspect this would take about two weeks in Seattle:

Interest from one of the neighbors

The other day they did brickwork on my corner, I think that's a car-sharing parking spot