Rise of the Drones

choi

Lev Grossman, Drone Home. Time, Feb 11, 2013 (cover date).
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2135132,00.html

Note:
(1) This is the cover story. The cover: "Rise of the Drones. They are America's global fighting machines. What happens when they're unleashed at home?
(2) The print version has four photographs, but the online version has one, absent a caption: "Flight path  Ben Miller, left, and Mike Dillon of the Mesa County, Colorado, sheriff's office use a Falcon UAV to track fugitives and lead search-and-rescue missions[.]"

The caption of a second photo: "Nice view   Realtor Ed Kaminsky uses drones to take promotional footage of properties that he's trying tosell, like this one in Altadena, Calif."

The caption of a third photo: "Night flight  Cy Brown, left, built a drone to help him (and partner James Palmer) hunt boar in his bother's rice field."  

(A similar photo in the Table of Contents says, "Cy Brown, (left, with hunting partner James Palmer) uses a night-visiondrone to find wild boars damaging a rice field in Bunkie, La."

(a) Mesa County, Colorado
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesa_County,_Colorado
(named for the many large mesas in the area)
(b) Cy is the short form of Cyril.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyril
(Greek for "lord")

But see Cy Young
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cy_Young
(1867-1955; christened Denton True Young; "Cy Young's nickname came from the fences that he had destroyed using his fastball. The fences looked like a cyclone had hit them. Reporters later shortened the name to 'Cy,' which became the nickname Young used for the rest of his life")
(c) Bunkie, Louisiana
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bunkie,_Louisiana
(Bunkie is also well known as the rice, sugarcane, sweet potato, waterfowl, boudin, boiled crawfish, fried fish, and cajun capital of the world)

(3) The print version also has a graphic of drones, including
(a) "AR.Drone 2.0  Built by the French company Parrot, it's a four-rotored recreational drone with an HD camera. You control it using a tablet or smart phone."

A model (only the color part on the top, with a BLACK shadow underneath) from the manufacturer:
http://ardrone2.parrot.com/usa/
(b) "Draganflyer X6  Larger and more muscular than the Parrot, the ragonflyer X6 is used both by hobbists and for practical applications like law enforcement."

Draganflyer X6 Six Rotor UAV Helicopter Aerial Video Platform. DraganFly, undated.
http://www.draganfly.com/uav-helicopter/draganflyer-x6/
(with three arms, each with TWO rotors: above and below the arm)
(c) "LEMV  The name stands for Long Endurance Multi-Intelligence Vehicle; basically it's a hellium-filed unmanned airship that can hover for three weeks at a time."

A undated drawing from the manufacturer Northrop Grumman:
http://www.as.northropgrumman.com/products/lemv/

(4) The article observes at web page 2, "Five years ago the Parrot couldn't have existed; it's an anthology of fresh-off-the-vine technologies. Five years ago there weren't cameras as tiny and sharp or chips as tiny and fast. Batteries weren't as light and didn't last as long. Smart phones and tablets still had a long way to go, as did the hyperminiaturized sensors with which the Parrot is studded: an accelerometer, a gyroscope, a magnetometer and a pair of ultrasound altimeters.
(a) The adjective "fresh-off-the-vine" is opften used to describe tomatoes.
(b) accelerometer
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerometer
(c) gyroscope
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gyroscope

Gyroscope; A Hila Science Video. YouTube.com, uploaded on Jan 2, 2009
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cquvA_IpEsA
("A toy gyroscope demonstrates the remarkable consequences of angular momentum")  

(5) The article describes at web page 3: "A squad of nimble, agile quadcopters from the University of Pennsylvania performed a son-et-lumière dance number at the Cannes Film Festival."
(a) son et lumière (n; French, literally, sound and light; First Known Use 1957):
"an outdoor spectacle at a historic site consisting of recorded narration with light and sound effects"
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/son+et+lumiere
(b) number (n):
"5: one singled out from a group : INDIVIDUAL: as
* * *  
b (1): a musical, theatrical, or literary selection or production
(2): ROUTINE, ACT
c: STUNT, TRICK"
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/number
(c) Evan Ackeman, Watch This Mind-Blowing Quadrotor Performance. IEEE Spectrum, June 26, 2013 (video).
http://spectrum.ieee.org/automat ... ectrum+Full+Text%29

(6) The article maintains at web page 3, "The Mesa County sheriff's office in Colorado was one of the first to use drones in police work. It currently fields a Draganfly X6 and a fixed-wing drone called a Falcon UAV. * * * "Also aerial photography. We can fly 50, 60 ft [15 to 18 m] off the ground and literally photo-map an entire crime scene.' The Falcon, which flies faster and longer but can't hover, is used to sweep wide-open spaces for, say, lost hikers. 'We do it because of cost,' Miller says. 'If it wasn't for cost, we'd just go out and buy a [conventional] helicopter.'

(7) The article argues at web page 4: "One issue slowing the integration of drones into everyday American life is that they crash a lot. Predators * * * run on relatively poky snowmobile engines, and they're surprisingly fragile. * * * Taken together, the Global Hawk [with a $233 million price tag], the Predator and the Reaper are the most accident-prone aircraft in the Air Force fleet, according to a Bloomberg report."
(a) poky (adj; from poke, the verb; First Known Use 1844): "SHABBY"
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/poky

(8) The article next avers, "A Reaper drone equipped with the Air Force's appropriately named Gorgon Stare sensor package, for example, can surveil an area 2½ miles across from 12 angles at once.
(a) Gorgon
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorgon
(The name derives from the Greek word gorgós, which means "dreadful;"  any of three sisters who had hair of living, venomous snakes, and a horrifying visage that turned those who beheld her to stone; while two of the Gorgons were immortal, Stheno and Euryale, their sister Medusa was not, and she was slain by the mythical demigod and hero Perseus)
(b) Gorgon Stare is the globe below the belly near the front of Reaper.
http://dmn.wpengine.netdna-cdn.c ... n-flight-web-lr.jpg

A frontal close-up view:
http://www.btcnews.com/btcnews/w ... 06/gorgon-stare.jpg

(9) The article asserts, "Until actual legislation is passed, it won't be completely clear what information the government can and cannot gather using drones."

Removing the word "actual," teh quotation is the sole excerpt in the window of the print.

(10) The article says, "The US's skunkworks are disgorging drones in a bizarre profusion."

For skunkworks, see Skunk Works
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skunk_Works