Dirty robots So you know how I like to paint little robots on postcards and mail them out to people? Yesterday, I spent some time with one of the robot recipients (who has a bunch) and borrowed them back so I could scan what they looked like on arrival. Here are two. They are a little bit dirty, but I love the orange marks stamped on the left side by postal machinery.
Robot Hall of Fame According to this press release, Carnegie Mellon University now has a Robot Hall of Fame:
The Robot Hall of Fame was established earlier this year to honor noteworthy robots, both real and fictional, along with their creators in recognition of the increasing benefits robots are bringing to society.
I think it is really neat that they are treating people who create fictional robots and people who create real-world robots as equals. Maybe someday, I'll write a story about a robot, and everyone will love my little robot character, and he/she will get to be in the Robot Hall of Fame. In my world, the Robot Hall of Fame is infinitely cooler than other halls of fame like the baseball one, or even the rock and roll one.
The Robot Hall of Fame's website will go live on November 10th, during the inauguration ceremony.
(I'm getting too robo-centric again, aren't I? I have to try harder to expand my electric horizons.)
Homestar Halloween The Homestar Runner guys put up a really fun Halloween game and some pumpkin stencils. I like the Strong Bad one so much I almost ran out and bought a pumpkin. But then I remembered I have work to do.
UPDATE: The new Halloween cartoon is up now, too. Featuring Strong Mad in a Magnum, P.I. costume!
Let's have a holiday theme! Check out this pumpkin carving robot at the Detroit Science Center. Kind of cool, and also kind of scary... perfect for Halloween.
My Halloween robots won't carve you a pumpkin, but you can take them trick-or-treating.
Flash fun This isn't about robots or the future, but it made me laugh out loud: Strindberg and Helium. It also made me want to talk like a helium balloon.
Other stuff Here is a New York Times article about robots that take pictures of other planets, and whether the resulting photos qualify as art. If you go to that link soon, you can read the whole article for free, but the Times charges for access to archived articles. I will paste my favorite paragraph here for people who stumble across this site in the future:
At one point in the evening several voices from the audience shouted for the moderator to move aside. He was blocking their view. The planetary panoramas snapped by machines may or may not be art, but their evocation of nature's profuse diversity inspired awe and wonder. The audience members knew they liked what they saw.
(Warning: This next part may sound true, but it only happened in my head!)
Last week I didn't update the site much. I guess you probably thought I was just busy, but really I was on a business trip to the future, doing some robot research. My futuristic rental car was a Toyota Fine-N fuel cell hybrid, and it totally rocked.
Robots with a purpose This BBC article says robots that do household chores are becoming more common. (I haven't seen any evidence of this in my apartment yet.)
And here is an article I read on CNN about how video games can be used to fight phobias.
I just read this article about a new robot by Sony called "Qrio." It sounds vaguely cute, in an Aibo-but-not-dog-shaped kind of way, but I don't want one. The idea of a robot companion is nice, but I would prefer a robot that makes me dinner or vacuums my apartment. Wouldn't useful robots have more appeal to the overworked masses than a robot that dances or wags its tail?
Maybe I shouldn't talk, though -- I thought this little flying robot I painted was cute, but now I'm realizing it wouldn't be good for much either. It's not big enough to carry people around. I guess it's just for sky-based fun, like a kite or a remote controlled airplane? (I am just as bad as Sony!)
Best use of web cam technology EVER I am mildly obsessed with this streaming web cam from the San Diego Zoo. I have never in my entire life seen anything as cute as that baby panda bear. I want to watch him 24 hours a day. When I tuned in this afternoon, the mother panda was rolling him around like a little ball and it was almost too much cuteness for my brain to handle.
Stupid company The Princeton graduate student who pointed out that anyone could override certain copy protection software just by pressing the shift key is being sued by the company that makes the software. Sure, the company lost about $10 million in market value after the news came out, but how is that his fault? Isn't it their fault for releasing a crappy product? Or for not doing a better job of testing it in the first place? This makes me want to give lots of money to the EFF.
It's 10 p.m. - Do you know where your children are? A New York TV station asks that question every night just before they start the news. For parents in Mexico, it could now be a lot easier to answer. Here's a press release about an "exciting child safeguard program" that will insert RFID chips into kids' arms. so that if the kids are kidnapped, their parents can find them by tracking the chip's radio signal. [Correction -- as Kelly so nicely points out, the chip only works if it gets scanned.]
Finding missing children sounds like a nice idea, but an FAQ on the company's website gives an idea of the big picture:
We are promoting VeriChip as a universal means of identification. We expect it to be used in a variety of applications including financial and transportation security, residential and commercial building access, military and government security.
Sounds like they're less concerned with finding kids than being able to track the entire population's movements somewhere down the line. Think I'd prefer to stay chip-free, thanks...
Robot art for boys I know The first one went to a friend who is very far away, so maybe he didn't even get it yet. Sshh. (I want him to be surprised.) The second one went to a friend who likes video games. It is a special game-bot that comes preloaded with a game called "Fingerbear's Adventures in Marioland."
A brief trip back in time Yeah, yeah, I know this site is supposed to be about futuristic stuff. But yesterday Neal Stephenson taught me that the past and the future are connected. (Well, I guess I knew that already, but he used better words and made it sound like a really cool idea.)
Tonight, my friend Lisa and I went to see a screening of some old educational films. Thanks to the films, I finally know how to behave so I'll get lots of dates, what to do if I catch VD from a trashy guy named Richard, how NOT to talk to kids about sex, and that 10 seconds is NOT a long enough time to brush my teeth. And I also learned that young people in the 1950's and 1970's looked a damn lot like the Brooklyn hipsters of today. Maybe someday, years from now, these will be considered educational films again, and people from the future will watch them to catch a glimpse of this country's wacky, wacky past...
More on futuristic apparel Here is an article from a Scottish newspaper that talks about the kinds of things our clothes might do for us in the future. It doesn't cover the scary stuff, like when your pants tell the store who you are as you walk in the door, but it has some ideas I really like. I have a heart murmur, and always wonder if I'll end up with a robot heart someday, that whirs like a machine instead of beating. The article mentions a vest that would have the ability to monitor the wearer's heart rate and send an alert if it's irregular. This could be good to have until my robot heart arrives...although it would get embarrassing if my clothes started flashing warning lights every time a cute boy made my heart beat faster.
Neal Stephenson, live! Tonight I went to see Neal Stephenson at Barnes & Noble. He is the author of one of my favorite sci-fi books, Snow Crash. (I also liked The Diamond Age a lot.) I've never read anything of his that I didn't like. Instead of reading out loud from his new book (he said he chose not to do a reading because he figured we could all read to ourselves faster than he could speak the words out loud), he held a Q&A session with the audience. Among other interesting tidbits, I learned that he used to be obsessed with having the latest technology, but now does almost all of his writing with a fountain pen, and that he doesn't feel the need to stay long when he visits the locations he writes about, because all of his impressions of a place generally hit him within the first 24 hours of arriving.
And now for some robots. The first one went to a stranger, and the second one went to my sister.
Trying to fly Wired News has an article about the Red Bull Flugtag event that I went to on Sunday. Basically, a bunch of brave (or crazy) people built homemade flying machines and attempted to fly them. In reality, the audience was just there to witness a bunch of strangely-shaped objects plunge into the Hudson River when they failed to stay in the air. But it was still kind of fun. I guess this isn't really about technology and maybe doesn't belong on my weblog, but at least it's a break from all the robot talk.
Occult investigator Today I made a new friend who is an occult investigator. On the subway, on the way to meet him, I drew a picture of what I thought he would look like (if he were a robot). I had never seen a photo of him or anything, but when I showed it to him later, we agreed it was quite accurate. He has a web log that he updates constantly, and he also has a website called holy robot. Cool, huh?
By the way, the reason the robot is not in color is because I was on the train. A pencil is hard enough to deal with on the subway. Paint and/or markers are out of the question.
Colorful (and e-commerce-ful) Look, I finally put some robots on my other website! For some reason, last weekend I decided to cut up some pieces of an amazon.com box and paint them bright colors. And tonight I finally finished painting little robots on them. The strange thing is, I have lots of nice paper and a bunch of canvases just waiting to be used. But instead, I was in the mood to paint on pieces of cardboard. I think the fact that it was an Amazon.com box gives them even more technological value. Hehe.
Question: Does the gray background I'm using for this site look bad on your monitor? On my laptop, it's a really nice gray, but today I have my big monitor plugged in and it is damned ugly.
His and her robots Neiman Marcus has a gift idea that is MUCH more fun than pink and blue towels. But I think I will have to wait until they go on sale (about 100,000 times).
Ugly futuristic jewelry In 2004, Nokia plans to release this oversized electronic necklace. The technology aspects make me want to like it (you can upload digital photos to its little screen), but I just can't get past the fact that it resembles a stethoscope. It's so big it seems to look bad on everyone -- and this is in the company's promotional photos, which have the added benefit of nice lighting and a professional photographer. Imagine how dumb it would look in real life! From the FAQ:
Nokia Medallion I is designed for fashion-oriented, design-driven people who are interested in complementing their outfit with a new kind of fashion accessory.
Ah, so maybe that's the problem. I am more of a fashion-driven, design-oriented person. So it's not for me at all.
