Man Wearing Jetpack Ascends 3100ft Mountain in 3 Minutes 30 Seconds

From Gravity Industries:

We proved you can scale a Lake District Mountain (3100ft Helveylln) in 3mins 30 seconds, despite very poor visibility that would have grounded a HEMS Helicopter. The Mountain Rescue foot response is over 70 minutes typically. The route was 1.2 miles and 2200ft of height gain.

This is the latest in a series of Paramedic Response Exercises to prove capability in parallel with training up real Paramedics to provide first response Critical Care in hard to reach geographies. Cardiac, breathing or blood loss cases are time critical and require rapid stabilisation to buy time for evacuation. This system, akin to the rapid response of a Paramedic on a motorbike in an urban environment, will be the difference between life and death for many critical cases.

[Gravity Industries | Via BIS]

Google Street Introduces New Features for 15th Anniversary

Google says a new camera will improve both the quality and scope of its Street View images. It’s also adding the “historical” mode to the mobile app version.

The company is promoting both changes as a way to mark the 15th anniversary of Street View’s launch.

The new camera weighs less than 15 pounds and, in Google’s unusual unit of measurement, is “roughly the size of a house cat”. Google says it offers three main benefits:

  • It’s easy to retrofit onto ordinary cars rather than needing custom vehicles.
  • It’s much more viable to use off-road, for example on a boat or snowmobile.
  • It’s modular, making it easy to add features such as laser scanners to pick up detail such as potholes.

The other change is to the historical mode, which was previously only available on the website version of Street View. Mobile app users will now be able to tap on any image and then select a “See more dates” option to access all previous imagery from that location.

The idea is to show changes such as buildings being constructed or removed. Having it on mobile should make it more convenient to satisfy curiosity when out and about, for example trying to figure out when something was built or challenging a claim to remember when “this was all fields.”

Web Rival Gopher Back In Spotlight

A handheld game system designer recently celebrated the first units shipping by posting a text file on Gopher. If you’re old enough to understand that sentence, I hope your knees and back are doing OK.

The Playdate console fits in a palm and has a small monochrome screen and retro-style arrow and A/B keys. It’s the work of a company called Panic whose co-founder Steven Frank shared his thoughts in a post at the end of April that’s just come to wider attention through The Register.

The post was on Gopher, an internet protocol and user interface that was made public at a similar time to the World Wide Web. While some sources say the name was a play on an underling “go-fer” retrieving information, its creators worked at the University of Minnesota and adopted the nicknames of the university’s sports teams.

It was vaguely similar in concept to the World Wide Web, but was largely text based with most multimedia only available as a file to download. As with the Web, the big goal was to avoid the need to manually browse through multiple FTP severs to find information. Instead, Gopher used a combination of menus and searching to find information across multiple locations.

Why Gopher ultimately lost out is disputed. One argument is that the Web’s design, with any document able to link directly to any other document, was more suitable as internet use grew. Another is that the university’s decision to charge a license fee for Gopher servers used for business was a killer blow.

Gopher is still usable through specialist browsers, though the easiest way is through extensions for Chrome and Firefox such as Burrow, used for the screenshot above.