Via Slashdot come a link to this MIT video (sorry, can’t find a way to embed it) about the work that Rodney Baxter (founder of iRobot) is doing to develop a new kind of industrial robot: cheap (~$22K), safe, and programmable by factory workers. What rings true in Brooks’ commentary is that people will find […]
MORNING LINKS ITEM: Speaking of swine flu hysteria, this may be a good time to invest in pork belly futures — there may be a shortage soon. ITEM: Yet another way in which Western Europeans are looking for the US to help them financially. ITEM: Here’s a slideshow of items from the Michael Jackson Neverland […]
From Military.com (emphasis mine): A Virginia-based company is hoping to test-fly a vertical take-off and landing drone before the end of this year that, ultimately, could do triple duty as strike vehicle, medevac or special ops insertion/extraction plane. The Excalibur is currently being developed as an armed, tactical unmanned aerial vehicle by Aurora Flight Sciences […]
You could probably devise an interesting psychological profiling test around a person’s favorite Pixar film; mine happens to be “The Incredibles”, so make of that what you will. What is telling is that Pixar has yet to make either a bad or an unsuccessful movie, a pretty stunning achievement given the river of diluted sludge […]
I’ve seen earlier video snippets of the ‘Big Dog’ robot that Boston Dynamics has been working on, but this one is longer, more varied, and more unsettling: This device looks, sounds, and moves like the unnatural offspring of H. P. Lovecraft’s psyche and the Terminator. At times, you’d swear that two people had been horribly […]
