Desert Blossoms

I’ve always liked the desert. The colors and terrain remind me of my favorite film venue: The American Western. Having grown up in the era of the TV Western I recall every night being exposed to a different hero: Gunsmoke, Riverboat, Bonanza, Sugarfoot, Cheyenne , Wagon Train, Yancy Derringer, Maverick, Wanted Dead or Alive, and my favorite Paladin all taught me sales strategies and human interaction skills. I was glad that my selling territory included New Mexico because I could not only call on the national labs at Sandia and Los Alamos but in conjunction with business get to see some great scenery and experience a great western adventure . Two of my favorite applications came out of the labs work in image processing and their charter within the DOE to protect and safeguard the nation’s nuclear stockpile.  One from Los Alamos dealt with developing a networked image processing system that would tie in satellite data, GIS overlays and live video. Truly ahead of its time the goal of this system was to plan the missions and monitoring of nuclear cargo around the country on the nation’s highways.  I was working of Gould’s Image & Graphics Division at the time and was thrilled to be contributing to this effort. I was even more enthralled several years after having participated in the effort when I became aware of a fantastic publication dealing with a morph of this topic. The book The White Train by Larry Purcell deals with the movement of nuclear stores via obviously a train. While on the Los Alamos project it was never discussed that anything but interstate travel would be planned and tracked; however it’s logical to consider the government would keep every option open. The system as designed could have certainly handled that type of contingency. The second application from Sandia labs also had a tie into possible shipments of nuclear materials in that it dealt with provide vision systems for autonomous vehicles. I was with Vicom Imaging at the time and sold the lab several systems that when combined with laser range finders allowed a small unmanned vehicle to navigate. We refined our pattern recognition skills and using edge detection routines able to navigate on roads using the side of the road on the left and the right as “markers” to steer from. One can only imagine how an autonomous capability could be brought into a nuclear cargo transfer scenario. So if you would like the combination of a western theme with a mystery and now timely commentary on current events go get a copy of this novel and enjoy!