WASHINGTON — They called it the Red Balloon Challenge. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, responsible for investing in next-generation technologies, recently paid researchers at MIT $40,000 to coordinate a social-media treasure hunt for 10 red balloons placed at various locations across the country. They succeeded, in eight hours, 52 minutes, and 41 seconds.
At Brown University, researchers received nearly $300,000 from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research to determine the color of the wings of the Archaeopteryx, a bird that lived 150 million years ago. They concluded “black, with 95 percent probability.”
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It's easy to see the defense implications of the red baloon experiment-- crowdsourcing the finding of IEDs would be my guess-- and of the jerky--MREs are important (as Napoleon said, an army travels on its stomach). I'm not sure about the others, but I expect there are many that on the surface seem silly but really do have serious purpose. I am concerned it might be a bit like Sarah Palin's fruit fly remark--she didn't understand that research into fruit flies was either for genetic research or for protection of food crops. I wonder how much of this really is waste (probably some) and how much is just misunderstood or twisted to sound ridiculous.
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