OK, OK, I admit it… whatever strange impulse compelled me to start up the whole Friday Science Roundup thing before seems to be reasserting itself. Dammit, just when I think I have gotten out, it keeps pulling me back in, with its siren song of there being one day a week on which I do not have to think up something to write about for that day.

But it’s not a roundup, dammit! It’s something else. Something less cowboy.

A Friday Science… salon? Kaffeklatch? Update? Bacchanal? I will work out the details later.

But I can’t guarantee that I won’t start resenting it and give it all up again.

Being a writer means never saying you’re sure. At least, for me, it does.

Anyhow, on with the science.

Here’s a story that combines two interesting things : theoretical data processing questions, and large birds of prey. It’s about just how fast a flying object (be it an unmanned drone or a Northern Goshawk) go and still be able to dodge around obstacles in an environment of a given density.

The Northern Goshawk enters into the equation because it hunts on the wing, and must pursue its flying prey through the tops of trees at heart pounding speeds in order to get a meal.

At the speeds it hunts at, the Northern Goshawk can’t possibly actually see all the tree tops around it. Instead, it moves at a certain speed at which it will be sure to always be able to find an opening in the green tunnels around it in order to continue its pursuit.

Researchers are studying how it does this in order to be able to build drones that can go faster. Right now, drones tend to be slow, especially when there’s stuff they might crash into.

It’s hoped that the Northern Goshawk might just teach them a thing or two about flying faster than you can see.

This really is the dawn of the Age of the Drone, isn’t it? From the United States using armed drones to take out hundreds of terrorist leaders in Afghanistan to something as absurdly mundane as Los Angeles real estate developers using drones to scout houses .

This strikes me as yet another example of something that was theoretically possible for years but nobody was able to get it to work (and hence it remain strictly science fiction) that finally emerges into reality in this modern era. Like nanotech, and cybernetics.

Of course, science fiction has also conditioned me to think of drones as evil spybots sent by oppressive governments to make sure you are not committing thought crime and/or assassinating people, so I can’t help but be a little freaked out by it all, as well.

Moving on, we have people trying to turn an old meat packing plant into a vertical farm.

Well, they call it a vertical farm, anyhow. It’s nowhere near the sci-fi ideal of a zero-G aeroponics farm with enormous clouds of wheat, rice, and corn floating in the air, roots, stalks, and all, and little robots coming along to mist the vegetation with nutrients now and then.

It’s not even, from the sound of the story, a properly planned out and executed vertically integrated farm, but they are moving in the right direction, anyhow : building a closed ecosystem, where the waste from one process is used as fuel for another process.

Of course, to be a farm and not just a highly sustainable garden, it can’t be a closed loop because some part of the process has to end up inside people in the form of food we eat. So there will therefore need to be some kind of constant input to balance out the output, no matter how finely balanced and efficient the ecosystems inside the process might be.

But then again, if you integrated the human beings themselves into the process, using their waste products as fertilizer in order to compensate for their consumption…. after all, urine is sterile and feces might be the most disgusting thing in the universe to us, but it’s just a lot of yummy fixed nitrogen to our plant friends…. hmmmm…

Of course, then nobody could leave the system once they entered it, but that would hardly be a problem compared to the efficiency benefits alone…

Of course, those Monicans would probably try to ruin everything...

Finally, a bit of random news from the world of big league psychiatry : they are thinking of deleting half the personality disorders from the DSM-IV when they (finally!) make the DSM-V.

For your information : the DSM is the standard for making diagnoses of psychiatric conditions in the world of psychology. It’s quite extensive and rigorous, which is especially important in the vague and misty world of the science of the human mind.

I had just been wondering lately whether they were even close to issuing a DSM-V yet when the article popped up before my eyes, almost as if StumbleUpon can read my mind.

Or the Universe conforms to my wishes, but only in ways I don’t expect. Take your pick.

Anyhow, what bugs me in the article is that they never actually give a decent explanation for why they would want to reduce the number of personality disorders.

It says it would be to “reduce comorbidity”, which I take to mean that it would reduce the number of people with multiple and overlapping diagnoses. And I suppose that would make the paperwork easier.

But that doesn’t mean those five personality disorders do not exist or are not therapeutically useful. You can’t make those problems go away just by taking them out of the DSM.

And what happens to single-diagnosis mental health patients who suddenly find their illness no longer exists and is therefore not covered by their health system? Do they just wander back into society, unmedicated and untreated and unhappy, and end up showing up in a less favorable part of the system, like the hospital, or jail?

It just strikes me as wrong.

Well, that’s it for now. Seeya next week folks!