Drone Control

And that brings up an interesting bit of information. Gaming improves thinking.

Ongoing research conducted by the Office of Naval Research suggests "that video games can help adults process information much faster and improve their fundamental abilities to reason and solve problems in novel contexts." This as posted at the United States Department of of Defense by Bob Freeman. Freeman quotes Ray Perez, program officer at the ONR's warfighter performance department who gave the following statements during a January 20 interview on Pentagon Web Radio's webcast, "Armed with Science: Research and Applications for the Modern Military." For those who have always been convinced that gaming isn't a 100% negative influence - as the mainstream media continually wants everyone to believe - these findings are for you. Perez says they have discovered that frequent game players "perform 10 to 20 percent higher in terms of perceptual and cognitive ability than normal people that are non-game players." Perez, who holds a doctorate in educational psychology, is seeking new training techniques that will allow our soldiers "to improve performance on the battlefield." This new war on terror has forced the military to adapt to "deadly adversaries who constantly change their tactics," and this being the case, games could be of great assistance. Said Perez:

"We have to train people to be quick on their feet - agile problem solvers, agile thinkers - to be able to counteract and develop counter tactics to terrorists on the battlefield. It's really about human inventiveness and creativeness and being able to match wits with the enemy."

Perhaps most interesting is the mention of something Perez calls "fluid intelligence," which is the "ability to change, to meet new problems and to develop new tactics and counter-tactics." ...that sounds a heck of a lot like what we always do in many games, doesn't it? Up until now, Perez says fluid intelligence was thought to be "immutable," in that it couldn't be changed or improved. The general belief was that after the age of 20, "most humans had achieved their brain cell capacity, and that new brain cells were acquired at the expense of existing ones." But playing video games have produced "surprising results" during testing and now, the aforementioned belief may be deemed incorrect.

Rigidity in thinking is a common occurrence. You see it all the time in the sciences. Some one finds an anomaly in an experiment and the first thought is "experimental error". And it usually is an experimental error. But the times when it isn't cause revolutions in science. From what I understand Einstein revolutionized physics based on a few anomalies.

Now if some one could come up with an accepted explanation of the Pioneer anomaly and/or the Flyby anomaly there could be a revolution in physics.

There are people thinking of explanations. But you need a fluid mind, because if you are rigidly locked in accepted theories it is difficult to come up with new ones. Or worse yet the ability to accept the overthrow of the old understanding.

Something called the Tajmar effect may have something to do with the Pioneer and flyby anomalies according to this paper:

Can the Tajmar effect be explained using a modification of inertia? [pdf]

M. E. McCulloch

School of Physics, University of Exeter - Stoker Road, Exeter, EX4 4QL, UK, EU and Marine Science & Engineering, University of Plymouth - Drake Circus, Plymouth, PL4 8AA, UK, EU

received 4 September 2009; accepted
in final form 3 December 2009 published online 5 January 2010
EPL (Europhysics Letters)

Abstract – The Tajmar effect is an unexplained acceleration observed by accelerometers and laser gyroscopes close to rotating supercooled rings. The observed ratio between the gyroscope and ring accelerations was 3±1.2×10−8. Here, a new model for inertia which has been tested quite successfully on the Pioneer and flyby anomalies is applied to this problem. The model assumes that the inertia of the gyroscope is caused by Unruh radiation that appears as the ring and the fixed stars accelerate relative to it, and that this radiation is subject to a Hubble-scale Casimir effect. The model predicts that the sudden acceleration of the nearby ring causes a slight increase in the inertial mass of the gyroscope, and, to conserve momentum in the reference frame of the spinning Earth, the gyroscope rotates clockwise with an acceleration ratio of 1.78±0.25×10−8 in agreement with the observed ratio. However, this model does not explain the parity violation seen in some of the gyroscope data. To test these ideas the Tajmar experiment (setup B) could be exactly reproduced in the Southern Hemisphere, since the model predicts that the anomalous acceleration should then be anticlockwise.

It is important to have a fluid but sceptical mind. Investigate. Everything is not settled.

Cross Posted at Classical Values