One day I will have a robot servant. Even if all he does is play table tennis with me…
And he won’t just one of these boring robots who serves the ball and nothing else…
No. He’ll be a fully functional opponent (this gets impressive at about 2:36… well, it’s impressive the whole way through…)
Jason Kottke runs one of the finest examples of the curated link blog out there. He manages to find and post some of the most interesting stuff online before just about any body else. Now, somebody built a robot version of Kottke… it’s an interesting experiment.
I don’t think of St. Eutychus as a link blog. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it’s a content blog. Sometimes it’s a soapbox. But my inclination towards link blogging waxes and wanes. It’s a great way to keep content flowing without investing significant time into posting, but you also get to a point where your curatorial or editorial senses are dulled. There are things on the Internet that don’t excite me as much as they used to. Everybody’s sharing stuff. Some people are sharing everything (I’m looking at you 22 Words)… Kottke describes this malaise beautifully in a piece about the robot version of himself…
“Some days, you just don’t want to do it,” Kottke says. “You look at so much stuff everyday and it all becomes kind of the same—all equally interesting or uninteresting. It’s hard to maintain that sense of discovery, that little hit that you get when you find something that you haven’t seen before. I’ve posted 15,000, maybe 20,000 links since I started. I’ve been whittling down the discovery space of things that are going to be new and interesting.”
Here’s Robottke – the machine version of the link blogger…
There’s a robot for that. In the day an age of every intangible calculation being performed by an iPhone app, it seems fitting that there are also robots for almost all tangible activities. I for one welcome our technological overlords.
You know how they say that pigs are the animal most closely genetically related to humans based on DNA? No? Well, I may have just made that up. You’ll have to google it…
But it turns out that a taste recognising robot thinks that human flesh tastes like bacon (don’t worry, they didn’t actually feed it a human).
That cute little fella is a robot that is designed to recognise flavours. He’s meant to be used for tasting wine, but Wired tells of a scary moment when somebody put their finger in his mouth:
“The idea is that wineries can tell if a wine is authentic without even opening the bottle, amongst other more obscure uses…like “tell me what this strange grayish lump at the back of my freezer is/was.”
But when some smart aleck reporter placed his hand in the robot’s omnivorous clanking jaw, he was identified as bacon. A cameraman then tried and was identified as prosciutto.”
While we’re on the subject of robots… here’s a cool little piece of trivia.
A robot with a processor as smart as the human brain would require at least 10 megawatts to operate. That’s the amount of energy produced by a small hydroelectric plant. But a small group of computer scientists may have hit on a new neural supercomputer that could someday emulate the human brain’s low energy requirements of just 20 watts–barely enough to run a dim light bulb.
If ever the Decepticons do attack you can rest assured we have friendly robots everywhere that will no doubt leap to our defence. They’ll be hiding though. They’re very sneaky, and all over the place. Where you’d least expect them.
Like playing pool…
Or making pancakes…
…Playing volleyball…
They might be packing stuff in a warehouse.
Or taking out the trash…
With all these powers combined and built into a body like this one they’ll be all set to protect us from the nasty aliens.
So, you like robots?
That’s probably a pick up line about as likely to get a teenage geek anywhere as just about every other pick up line they might use, that is to say, not very far.
But if you do like robots, and you’ve got a bunch of time because you’re a single teenage geek, then maybe you should head over and check out this attempt to draw 165 Robots with Stuff…
If you thought the best bit about Transformers 2 was the kung fu robots then you just have to check out this trailer for a Chinese movie that’s coming out this year. It looks awesome.
Radiohead’s Thom Yorke is an interesting looking guy who makes interesting sounding music. Those who are unaware of Radiohead should do themselves a favour and become aware – those who are aware – how cool is this “Paranoid Android” inspired Thom Yorke head…
The coffee of the future will not be made by man – no, we’ll have little robot servants to make the coffee for us. The original post is in Japanese – but this video demonstrates its awesomeness.