The Washington Post ran a story by Rick Weiss earlier this month about various government agencies developing, and possibly deploying, robotic insects. A link to this story can be found in the NEWS section of this site, but in a nutshell the idea is to shrink the capabilities of a Predator drone down to the size of a flying insect. The photograph accompanying the article shows a robo-bug sitting atop a fingertip. The Fly Kilkenny used in Chifeng prison is precisely what Weiss described as the goal of those trying to fabricate such complex piece of engineering.

One of my children's favorite books is about a bumblebee named Buzzy who suddenly cannot fly after being told a bee's wing-to-body ratio make physically impossible to do so. Flight is the most difficult problem for such tiny machines because the dynamics at this scale really are different than for larger bodies like birds or aircraft. Insect wings are very different in shape and stroke than bird wings, like comparing helicopters to planes. Scientifically, we are dealing with the aerodynamics of a flapping airfoil.

I first came across MAVs (mirco-air vehicles) about five years ago while doing some research for Bird of Prey with the Department of Aerospace Engineering at the University of Michigan. The idea of releasing swarms of cheaply built insect spies immediately intrigued me and. Like a magpie, I stashed this bit of information away for what became The Secret Cardinal. If you watch the book trailer, you’ll see these grainy shots of Bishop Yin praying in his cell at Chifeng Prison. These are Fly-eye views as Kilkenny finally locates the bishop. I do not doubt that in a few years we will see images shot by the real thing.

Labels: bishop, Cardinal, China, micro air vehicle, prison

The Dalai Lama recently visited Washington, DC, where he met privately with the president and later received a Congressional Gold Medal for his work in the field of human rights. Beijing threw a tantrum that included strongly worded demands that the U.S. Government correct this grave error and cancel both the ceremony and the president's meeting with the exiled Tibetan leader. There were also reports that Chinese hackers attacked Internet search engines in the U.S., misdirecting requests for Google and Yahoo to the Baidu site instead.

The oft-cited reason for China's ire was our interference in their internal affairs. Near as I can tell, an act of Congress to honor someone is an internal affair of the United States, and China's demands constitute the same type of interference that they are decrying. Of course, China's 1951 invasion of Tibet had little on that nation’s internal affairs.

Pope Benedict and the Dalai Lama have much in common with regard to China. Beijing fears and despises both men because they speak for a persecuted segment of Chinese society and represent a moral authority that could challenge China's totalitarian regime. It is interesting to see a state with the largest standing military, in the midst of a military expansion since the U.S. entered World War II, terrified of two old men in command of nothing more that their personal bodyguards. But even Mao knew that people of faith believe in something greater that the state, and that is where the danger lies.

At the end of May, Pres. Bush held an off the books meeting the Cardinal Zen of Hong Kong in the White House residence. News of this meeting broke several weeks later, and Beijing said nothing to allow the story to die quietly. Zen may well be the most dangerous Roman Catholic in China because, as a cardinal, he is in a position to be elected pope. The combination of the Dalai Lama and a Chinese pope would likely be more than Beijing could handle.

Labels: Cardinal, China, Dalai Lama, gold medal, pope, Vatican