The world’s smallest helicopter
It’s so cute! It looks like some kind of bug. But while the giggly little kid in me wants to get one so I can terrify my dog, my rational side is scrounging around for a practical purpose for this thing. LifeFlight? Um, no. Traffic copter? Doubt it could handle the winds. Airborne spycam? Who wouldn’t notice it buzzing around the room?
Don’t DO it!!!
Do it. You know you want to. Every once in a while, we must all listen to that tiny little voice that says “This looks like fun. We could terrorize the dog with this…”
Because we cannot be rational, right thinking, politically correct, upstanding human beings every single second of every single day of our existences, and fercryinoutloud, YOU NEED TO PLAY!!!
Well, as much fun as it would be to tease the pooch, I doubt the teeny weeny cutesy-wootsy helicopter is available to the general public. (At least, not yet. The Japanese electronics industry does have a long history of producing useless and extremely expensive toys that amaze and amuse your friends for half an hour or so. )
On the surface though, this one looks like it might have a more practical purpose than the average Aibo. The question is, what could you use this for?
It would be fun as all hell. It would be fun to buzz the cats and run air raids on the dogs’ positions. It would be fun to see the world from a new perspective. That alone justifies its existence, both from a human point of view and a marketing point of view.
But look at it this way: People who fly things like these will gain important insights into how flight works at a small scale, how propellors and wings scale down to insect size and lower. If we can gain an accurate predictive model for small surfaces moving very quickly in air, we can develop new kinds of aircraft. Imagine finding a wing shape so efficient at small scales that a handful of relatively miniscule engines could lift and maneuver a `flying bedstead’ the size of a car, or a way to store and transmit power efficiently enough to make embedded computing in things like pens practical.
Wouldn’t we just be playing with it, though? Yes, but research is often formed through play. By observing what we can and cannot make our little toys do, we gain insights that enable our predictions of more `serious’ systems.
Photography.
CMOS Active Pixel cameras are getting smaller and smaller…
How fast can it go from Idyllwild Airport to the Belgian Congo?
Freemasons run the country!
I thought this was going to be a Simpsons (danger: sound) discussion.