Er, no. It’s the ‘Tyrannos’ from Logi Aerospace, which in conjunction with other companies and organisations including the South West Research Institute and Californian electric-vehicle firm ZAP has responded to a Pentagon call for a vehicle that would enable the US Marines to dodge IEDs without being as vulnerable as a helicopter. According to The Register, the vehicle offers full hover and is “fairly quiet”.

The Tyrannos is nominally intended to provide Marines with the ability to leapfrog over troublesome roadside bombs, mines, and ambushes while remaining able to drive on the ground as they normally might. However, it promises to be much quieter than ordinary helicopters in use and far easier to fly and maintain.

If the Tyrannos can do all its makers claim, it really does have the potential to become the flying car for everyman.

Lots of ducted-fan technology and a supercharged race engine. Does 240mph flat out. No word on emissions, though.

On balance, I think I’ll pass on this one. It’d never get me through Silver Street at rush hour.

One of the things I love about the Saturday edition of the Financial Times is that it often has the most unexpected obituaries. Here’s the latest — the life story of an Italian cavalry officer who is straight out of the pages of Evelyn Waugh. Sample:

Amedeo Guillet crammed rather a lot into his 101 years. He is best remembered for leading, on his white Arabian stallion, Sandor, a potentially suicidal cavalry charge against the tanks and 25-pounder artillery guns of Britain’s advancing “Gazelle Force” in the Horn of Africa in 1941. It was the last ever cavalry charge against British troops and earned the then Lieutenant Guillet the nickname Comandante Diavolo – the Devil Commander – from both his own men and an enemy that came to respect and even befriend him. Usually dressed like an Arab or Ethiopian tribesman, he became known in his native land as “Italy’s Lawrence of Arabia”.

On that misty January dawn in 1941 at Keru gorge, Eritrea, troops of Britain’s 4/11th Sikh regiment, the Surrey and Sussex Yeomanry and the 1st Bengal Cavalry were brewing tea before advancing against regular Italian forces. It was then that Guillet, wearing Arab clothes and screaming “Savoia!” – Savoy, his homeland – led 250 Ethiopian and Yemeni tribesmen in a galloping charge through the allied ranks, firing antique carbines, slashing with scimitars and tossing home-made grenades before retreating in a cloud of dust. The raiders’ loss was great – perhaps half their men – but the psychological damage they inflicted gave an important breather to retreating Italian regular troops…

Wow! He lived to be 102, and spent the last part of his life in Ireland chasing foxes — on horseback, naturally.

There’s an intriguing article in Newsweek about the decline in creativity in American schoolkids — as measured by the Torrance test.

Nobody would argue that Torrance’s tasks, which have become the gold standard in creativity assessment, measure creativity perfectly. What’s shocking is how incredibly well Torrance’s creativity index predicted those kids’ creative accomplishments as adults. Those who came up with more good ideas on Torrance’s tasks grew up to be entrepreneurs, inventors, college presidents, authors, doctors, diplomats, and software developers. Jonathan Plucker of Indiana University recently reanalyzed Torrance’s data. The correlation to lifetime creative accomplishment was more than three times stronger for childhood creativity than childhood IQ.

Like intelligence tests, Torrance’s test—a 90-minute series of discrete tasks, administered by a psychologist—has been taken by millions worldwide in 50 languages. Yet there is one crucial difference between IQ and CQ scores. With intelligence, there is a phenomenon called the Flynn effect—each generation, scores go up about 10 points. Enriched environments are making kids smarter. With creativity, a reverse trend has just been identified and is being reported for the first time here: American creativity scores are falling.

Kyung Hee Kim at the College of William & Mary discovered this in May, after analyzing almost 300,000 Torrance scores of children and adults. Kim found creativity scores had been steadily rising, just like IQ scores, until 1990. Since then, creativity scores have consistently inched downward. “It’s very clear, and the decrease is very significant,” Kim says. It is the scores of younger children in America—from kindergarten through sixth grade—for whom the decline is “most serious.”

Conversation With a Univac, courtesy of Scott Lloyd, originally uploaded by gruntzooki.

Scott Lloyd and his wife found this old printout of an interactive session with a Univac and sent it along to BoingBoing. Thanks to Cory for posting it. Younger readers will be incredulous to discover that this is how one once interacted with computers. But it was.

Oh — a Univac was a time-shared mainframe computer.