Arizona Technology Roundup

Six high-schoolers at the East Valley Institute of Technology have channeled their skills and talents into creating a robot whose sole purpose is to destroy other robots. The competition is tomorrow which means that, by the time you read this, it'll be over.

Man, I love BattleBots. I totally lost track of it when Comdedy Central cancelled the show. I'm happy to see it's still growing strong.

Now I have a serious decision to make as to what to do with my Saturday. BattleBots competition, or Book Festival? Quite the conundrum.

Shoot, they had one today and as an Arizona Tech blogger, I'd intended to try to attend these things and discuss them here. Oh well, I do have a real job that I get paid for, and I do this blog for free, so guess where my priorities lie. I see from the agenda that there will be a presentation on Science Foundation Arizona. I'm hoping that GCIT will have the presentation posted at their web site. If not, I'll try to get a copy and link it here.

Read the article here and then click on Read other comments on this issue. The comments are in reverse-chronological order so you'll probably want to go to the end and read backwards. I'm particularly impressed with the substantial research and concise commentary by Dr. W. J. Golz, although it probably helps that I agree with him.

Science Foundation Arizona has named Bill Harris, former head of Science Foundation Ireland, as its director, according to the Arizona Republic. Mr. (Dr?) Harris is charged with building an industry in Arizona whose salaries will average about a tenth of his. While many people are excited about the prospects offered by the man credited for the growth of the "Celtic Tiger," others are more skeptical.

Personally, I'm excited excited about what future research we can look forward to with the former head of Science Foundation Ireland heading up our science efforts.

Mmmmm...Computational Fluid Dynamics. (Yeah, that's my comment down there.)

Full disclosure: I work at Orbital Sciences.

After a slight glitch a few days ago, one of Orbital Science's Pegasus rockets was successfully launched today. The rocket contained three small satellites which are used to measure the earth's magnetic field as part of NASA's Space Technology 5 (ST5) program.

Since the launch was at mid-morning, we weren't treated to the light show we got with the twilight launch of the Minotaur a few months ago.

Rather than being launched from the ground, the Pegasus, which has wings (get it?) is carried to launch altitude by an L-1011, which essentially acts as its first stage. The Pegasus is then dropped from the aircraft at which point the motor ignites, lifting the rocket into space.