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Books Idle

XKCD Author Challenges Serena Williams To Attack A Drone (xkcd.com) 87

Posted by EditorDavid from the at-your-service dept.
In just 16 days XKCD author Randall Munroe releases a new book titled How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems. He's just released an excerpt from the chapter "How to Catch a Drone," in which he actually enlisted the assistance of tennis star Serena Williams.

An anonymous reader writes: Serena and her husband Alexis just happened to have a DJI Mavic Pro 2 with a broken camera -- and Munroe asked her to try to smash it with tennis balls. "My tentative guess was that a champion player would have an accuracy ratio around 50 when serving, and take 5-7 tries to hit a drone from 40 feet. (Would a tennis ball even knock down a drone? Maybe it would just ricochet off and cause the drone to wobble! I had so many questions.)

"Alexis flew the drone over the net and hovered there, while Serena served from the baseline..."

His blog has the rest of the story, and Munroe has even illustrated the experiment, promising that the book also contains additional anti-drone strategies, an analysis of other sports projectiles, and "a discussion with a robot ethicist about whether hitting a drone with a tennis ball is wrong."
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XKCD Author Challenges Serena Williams To Attack A Drone More

XKCD Author Challenges Serena Williams To Attack A Drone

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  • did she do it (Score:1, Funny)

    by ruddk ( 5153113 )

    without having a hissy fit?

  • Influencers, and their followers... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by rmdingler ( 1955220 ) on Sunday August 18, 2019 @05:52PM (#59100196) Journal

    Tried and true from Madison Avenue's perspective, advertising using celebrities catches eyes and viewers.

    Ironically enough, Randall Munroe would be celebrity enough if Slashdot readers were the target market, but Serena opens up the prospect of audience recognition to a much wider demographic, though perhaps not that of a Kardashian-class pitch.

    • Re:Influencers, and their followers... (Score:5)

      by Eloking ( 877834 ) on Sunday August 18, 2019 @08:30PM (#59100502)

      Well, yeah but science does need to reach a broader audience.

      And while some stunts with celebrities does seems forced, I find that one rather amusing.

      • Comic books are not science.

        Engineering also isn't science, btw.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by Eloking ( 877834 )

          Comic books are not science.

          Engineering also isn't science, btw.

          Comic book is a mean to transfert informations. You could make a comic book out of your thesis and it will be science. XKCD is the perfect example of this.

          And I dont know what you're smoking but if you don't consider engineering science (engineering is applied science for crying out loud), then nothing is. And while I'm at it, why did you brought engineering (or comic book), where does that come from?

          Obligatory XKCD [xkcd.com]

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by rtb61 ( 674572 )

            You can hack the software and you can hack the hardware but if you really want to do the highest level of hacking, you have to hack the wetware. Just tell rich people, that drones are cheap and if they do not lobby to ban them, poor people will be able to spy on them all of them time. Don't forget cheap facial recognition has already been invented and just needs to be applied and the poor can monitor the rich where ever they go now and whom ever they meet.

            The only way for the rich to keep their dirty disgu

          • And I dont know what you're smoking but if you don't consider engineering science (engineering is applied science for crying out loud)

            Engineering is like medicine: it can use applied science and in some cases can even be applied science but, fundamentally, it is not science. Science is all about understanding. Engineering is about building better widgets. If an engineer develops better widget but has no idea how it works then this is an engineering marvel but it is appallingly bad science - if indeed it is even science at all.

            Of course, using science to understand how things work is the best way we know of to figure out how to build b

            • If an engineer builds a widget and it works, but he doesn't know why, that's not engineering, that's trial and error. Real engineers try to avoid trial and error. But, the experimentation used to understand a design that doesn't work, or reverse engineer a competitor's design that does work, is similar to science. Fast and cheap iteration cycles have led some to bypass doing the math and rigorous testing required of traditional engineering. But, even with fast and cheap iteration, an engineer should und

            • Science has nothing to do with understanding.

              The science-like thing that is based on understanding is called Natural Philosophy.

              IMO the world would be a better place if this was taught in schools instead of science, but it isn't.

              Science is a process. It has nothing to do with "understanding." You start with an idea. You form a hypothesis. You do experiments. You publish results of the experiments. If other scientists agree that your hypothesis predict the results of the experiment, it becomes a theory. Tha

              • Hmm...
                That was surprisingly good.

              • Science has nothing to do with understanding.....We know how the physical laws underlying Maxwell's Equations work, but we have no idea why.

                Exactly - so science IS about understanding: it is understanding how things work which is literally exactly what I said. We use the scientific method to gain that understanding but the goal of science is most definitely to understand how the universe works. No physicist I know, myself included, would agree with your statement that "understanding" is not possible: gaining an understanding of how the physical laws that govern the universe work is literally what every physicist does.

                You seem to have redefi

                • You're making one of the first philosophical mistakes you can make. Knowledge is not understanding. We may know certain attributes of a complex system, and be able to predict its status in known ways, but we do not have any awareness of the mechanism itself. We understand our approximations very well, but they are just elegant approximations of a complex whole which we do not intrinsically understand. We can gain more knowledge and approximate it even better, but we are just not at the point where we under

                  • Something as simple as light, we know how it moves, what properties it possesses as it does, but no idea what it is made of and only have scratched the surface in terms of behaviour.

                    Since we are talking about science and not philosophy it is not a mistake. The knowledge we gain from experiments allows us to improve our understanding of how the universe works. We do understand exactly what light is made of: oscillating electric and magnetic fields. The speed it moves at is defined, not by it but by the properties of space-time itself and its other properties are determined by a fundamental symmetry of nature. The limits of our understanding are now well beyond the level of just thinkin

                    • Since we are talking about science and not philosophy it is not a mistake.

                      You're just talking past the people you respond to without comprehending or considering what they said. That isn't science, and I'll grant that it isn't really philosophy either.

                      If you think science can exist without philosophy, you're merely a Faith-based worshiper of a cargo-cult image of science. This must always be true, because we have no a priori knowledge of the physical world. We have no a priori knowledge of the meaning of any measurement we take. If you have only science but no philosophy, you don

                  • Even the "speed limit" is a lie that falls out of the approximation; according to quantum theory, the individual photons are moving faster or slower than that, and the speed of light is merely a very consistent average, not any kind of "limit."

        • Comic books are not science.

          Engineering also isn't science, btw.

          If you are building a bridge, you develop a hypothesis, "This bridge I am building will not fall down." And you design elements of your experiment to disprove your hypothesis. If you fail to disprove your hypothesis, congratulations! The bridge you built stays up. This is the kind of scientific method that you can stand on, although please don't spit over the side.

          • False.

            If you're building a bridge, you either recombine features of known strength, (called architecture) or you calculate the strength needed and the proportions of required materials based on that.

            You're not allowed to be all wishy-washy and throw shit at the wall, draw up some bullshit and then design some experiments.

            When the planning commission tells you that they can't approve your design until an engineer proves the design, they're not talking about doing experiments, they're talking about calculatin

        • Comic books are not science.

          Engineering also isn't science, btw.

          Let me guess, science is what 'you' do?

        • That's because science isn't a noun, it's a verb:

          sci-ence
          verb
          The intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behavior of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment.

          • That's because science isn't a noun, it's a verb

            "I will science today"
            "She sciences badly"
            "He scienced last week"
            Heard any of these? Neither have I.

            The intellectual and practical activity ...

            In other words, the name of a particular activity.
            You're not an English speaker, are you?

            • We both speak English, so hand me a science and let's get started...

              The word "science" often brings up all the facts, theories, laws, and principles taught in science class. In reality, those things are produced through science, but they are not science themselves.
              Science is not a collection of things; it is not a noun. Science is a verb!
              Science is an active process of learning, and the scientific method guides scientists as they do science (designing, carrying out, analyzing and explaining their research)

  • Outcome? (Score:5, Informative)

    by enriquevagu ( 1026480 ) on Sunday August 18, 2019 @06:03PM (#59100218)

    TLDR: She hit and smashed the drone into the ground in the third serve.

    So yes, a tennis ball can knock down a drone from 40 feet (at least, if you are Serena Williams).

    • TLDR: She hit and smashed the drone into the ground in the third serve.

      That is impressive. Hitting a flying object is harder than it looks.

      Prior to WW2, the British estimated that one 1 of every 50 AAA rounds would hit an enemy aircraft. The actual number turned out to be less than 1 in 5000.

      Later in the war, proximity fuses helped improve effectiveness.

      • It wasn't flying, it was hovering in place above the tennis net, so it was a stable fixed-position target.

        The ball hit one of its propellers and that was enough to make it fall out of the sky.

        • The article doesn't say how high above the net, but if it was in a place where she would normally hit the ball, it would have been much easier to aim and rely on well trained muscle memory. If a drone is higher than the maximum height you'd ever hit a ball during a tennis match, it would be much harder to hit. Same if there are no reference points, and all you see is a drone against a sky.

      • hardly a fair comparison. in WW2 you basically had gunners making best guess estimates of the height and speed of the aircraft as well as wind and to top it off they had guns were not exactly highly accurate. It would be more akin to serena trying to hit a fly moving across the court at 40 feet with a ball.
      • Who would have thunk hitting a stationary target sitting a few feet above the ground would be easier hitting one moving at a fair clip thousands of feet up?
    • The blog isn't clear about altitude, but it doesn't seem to have been "40 feet" in the air. The first part (drawings and text) talk about a drone harrassing you from above, but the part about the experiment makes it appear that they just had it hover 40 feet away, horizontally, at about head height. I don't know if the performed experiment addresses the question very well.

    • So yes, a tennis ball can knock down a drone from 40 feet (at least, if you are Serena Williams).

      You don't need to be Serena Williams. I think Randall vastly overestimated how difficult this would be with practice. While taking tennis lessons in jr. high, my serves were unusually accurate for my class. The instructor put small garbage cans into the corners of the service area and said he'd buy lunch for anyone who could hit them a dozen times. I hit them 22 times, the closest anyone else got was 7. (My

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Cederic ( 9623 )

        I think Randall vastly overestimated how difficult this would be with practice

        I think Randall did this for publicity and didn't really care how easy or difficult this was.

        But yes, Serena will be reasonably competent at choosing where a tennis ball goes after it leaves her racket.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by epine ( 68316 )

        I was hardly a great tennis player, so I'd assume any pro would be at least as accurate as I was.

        Or possibly a better mathematician.

        The beer leagues are positively overflowing with pre-tweeners possessing at least one skill that could easily be honed to professional standards. The problem is not having one elite skills. The problem is having the whole package.

        A goalie prospect in hockey can look like a million bucks, then about two weeks into the goalies first call-up, word goes around that the prospect is

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Blue23 ( 197186 )

        You don't need to be Serena Williams. I think Randall vastly overestimated how difficult this would be with practice. While taking tennis lessons in jr. high, my serves were unusually accurate for my class. The instructor put small garbage cans into the corners of the service area and said he'd buy lunch for anyone who could hit them a dozen times. I hit them 22 times, the closest anyone else got was 7. (My serves were also among the hardest in the class, so I wasn't trading off speed for accuracy. It all comes down to a consistent toss and swing.)

        This is actually addressed in Randal's blog post, about the the differences in hitting things on the ground in specific portions of the court vs. hitting something in the air. Being able to place a ball in bounds where you want it is a practical skill for a tennis player.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Bert64 ( 520050 )

      So she double faulted, and had to cheat to hit the drone...

      Most people would not have the accuracy or power of serena williams when hitting a tennis ball.

    • When I was a teenager we built perhaps 50 different versions of tennis ball cannons using various cans and pipes. We fueled them with white gas or zippo lighter fluid or final net hair spray. These were very analogous to potato guns. The difference is a misplaced tennis ball shot into the air (and yeah we did that plenty) simply bounced because terminal velocity of a tennis ball doesn't even hurt much let alone harm anyone. Initially we were simply shooting straight up for fun and at night lighting the ball

  • getting rid of annoying drones with tennis professionals?

    Shotgun with bird shot, or crashing another drone into the one you want to get rid of,

    • Shotgun with bird shot

      Maybe if it's sitting in front of concrete wall, I might say go for it. Unfortunately, unless you're way out in the boondocks, there are probably people living around you who may not appreciate a rain of birdshot.

    • Distributing toxic lead into the environment is not a good solution. Steel shot could work, though.

      Still, gunshots attract SWAT teams. Cops will be called and I doubt current-year law enforcement is ready to accept gunshots in defense of privacy.

    • getting rid of annoying drones with tennis professionals?

      Shotgun with bird shot, or crashing another drone into the one you want to get rid of,

      Attach the shotgun to the drone and then we'll be talking.

    • Give the your attack drone a spray can of silly string.to foul the props on the target drone. No reason to crash it.

    • That sound you heard wasn't a drone...it was the point of a science + comedy book flying right over your head.

  • I went in expecting something fairly interesting and amusing and about on par with Mythbusters in terms of science, but it wasn't particularly humourous and apart from the idea that Serena Williams (an actual celebrity) agreed to do this, there isn't much else to it.

    They only took down 1 drone, there didn't appear to be any attempt to measure accuracy over particular ranges or against different types of drones, or trying rackets, etc. Maybe it's more fleshed out in the book.

  • DJI (Score:2)

    by dohzer ( 867770 )

    Serena and her husband Alexis just happened to have a DJI Mavic Pro 2

    That's probably because every second person has a DJI these days.

  • Although a sunroof is larger than a drone. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=tenn... [duckduckgo.com]

  • This is FPV racing drones vs target shooters on a firing range.

    https://youtu.be/xq0oCM37oZA [youtu.be]

    Yes a shotgun would be more effective. This though is way more fun.

  • FYI, Serena Williams's husband Alexis Ohanion is the co-founder of Reddit

  • No? :(

  • Ethics? Give me a break. (Score:5, Funny)

    by mnemotronic ( 586021 ) <mnemotronic@@@gmail...com> on Monday August 19, 2019 @01:09AM (#59100998) Homepage Journal

    ... and "a discussion with a robot ethicist about whether hitting a drone with a tennis ball is wrong."

    Are you effing kidding? That Mavic bitch's cousin took my job at the Mac Donalds. It ain't fair to the tennis ball, for sure, but the drone? I say, knock that thing down, set it on fire and run over with the tractor.

    • I don't have a problem with trying to take down a drone. I have a problem with asking a so called ethicist whether you should or not hit what is essentially a dumb machine. It's kind of like having to ask a so called ethicist whether you should kick the tires on a new car or not. The robot ethicist is what needs to be "taken out" so to speak.

      I'm afraid to ask what will the SJWs and their overactive small minds might invent next. Maybe civil rights for rocks??

      • You remember the iPhone smashing videos?

        Is it ethical to destroy an expensive item for fun, wasting resources and littering the environment?

        What SJWs mistake is conflating "ethics" with "the law" and attempting to legislate morality or gang-stalk thousands into making their morality not de-jure but de-facto the only possible way.

        • The shoe is on the other foot for the first time ever.

          The only sad part is people learned the wrong lesson -- to control the social ostracism as a weapon instead of adopting live and let live, which they screamed for for thousands of years while under that yoke.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ediron2 ( 246908 )

      Uh-oh. Wait until you find out that the tractor is likely heavily automated, too. And the tennis ball's made by robots.

      Quis custodiet ipsos custodes.
       

  • Normally I post obligatory XKCD to silly stories. But now I post an obligatory silly story to an XKCD discussion. https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

  • Alleged video. [youtube.com] Fake news?

    It's hard to see the drone until after it's hit. Ideally they'd edit in an arrow next to it. But, it's easy to re-watch after you know where to look.

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