Hackaday Links: May 7, 2023

More fallout for SpaceX this week after their Starship launch attempt, but of the legal kind rather than concrete and rebar. A handful of environmental groups filed the suit, alleging that the launch generated “intense heat, noise, and light that adversely affects surrounding habitat areas and communities, which included designated critical habitat for federally protected species as well as National Wildlife Refuge and State Park lands,” in addition to “scatter[ing] debris and ash over a large area.”

Specifics of this energetic launch aside, we always wondered about the choice of Boca Chica for a launch facility. Yes, it has all the obvious advantages, like a large body of water directly to the east and being at a relatively low latitude. But the whole area is a wildlife sanctuary, and from what we understand there are still people living pretty close to the launch facility. Then again, you could pretty much say the same thing about the Cape Canaveral and Cape Kennedy complex, which probably couldn’t be built today. Amazing how a Space Race will grease the wheels of progress.

From the Dystopia du Jour Department, new this week from the University of Texas of a “brain activity decoder” that can read people’s thoughts using AI. Lest anyone panic about having your thoughts read covertly, relax — the technique requires a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner. So it’s not likely that anyone will be hacking your head anytime soon. But the method is still interesting.

Models are built from extensive training sessions that involve volunteers listening to hours of podcasts while in the fMRI machine. Later on, when the volunteers listen to a new podcast or even just imagine a story in their heads, the machine generates an approximation of the thoughts based on the new fMRI data. The results are pretty decent, with the decoded thoughts sometimes exactly matching the stimulus; but, being based on the same technology as ChatGPT, sometimes the decoded thoughts were comically incorrect. The researchers hope the technology can bring speech back to those with brain injuries, and are hopeful that fNIRS (functional near-IR spectroscopy) will provide a more portable solution. Of course, this just means we’ve got to do an article on fNIRS so we can understand what that’s all about.

Then again, maybe this whole dystopia thing won’t be that bad — at least not judging by this robo face-plant. The bot in question is Agility Robotics’ Digit, the creepy backward-knees, semi-anthropomorphic robot that seems targeted at the collaborative robotics market. Digit was working in a mock warehouse setup at ProMat, a manufacturing and supply chain trade show, when it suffered the mishap. From the video, it doesn’t appear that anything broke, at least not externally. It almost seemed like the right knee joint gave out as soon as Digit put weight on it. Agility reps were apparently quite pleased that Digit worked for 20 hours straight before failing, but it’ll likely have to do better than that in a production environment. But whatever — if this is the best that Skynet can throw at us when it decides to turn out the lights, we’ll be fine.

We spotted a story on PetaPixel about a smartphone camera that was destroyed by a laser that makes us just cringe — and not just because it shows someone recording video in portrait mode. It happened at a concert in Naples back in April, where the concertgoer was using his camera to record the proceedings when a laser beam swept vertically through the frame several times. This appears to have permanently fried the image sensor in the camera; presumably at least some of the cameras around this victim were zapped too. If the laser could do that to a CCD, what did it do to all those retinas?

And finally, if the tool’s not right, the guy’s not bright. Our favorite YouTube historian, Lance “The History Guy” Geiger had a video on the 1964 Minuteman missile accident, a Broken Arrow incident that we’d never heard about. We’d heard about the incident where a missile tech dropped a wrench into a Titan missile silo and nearly blew up Arkansas — Lance covered that one, too — but this one is somehow more insidious. We won’t spoil the surprise, but suffice it to say that when the manual says to use a fuse puller, use a fuse puller, not a screwdriver.