Robots

bfwebster on April 29th, 2009

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 [...]

Continue reading about Wednesday’s a snooze day

bfwebster on September 23rd, 2008

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 [...]

Continue reading about Rise of the machines

bfwebster on July 2nd, 2008

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 [...]

Continue reading about “WALL-E”: a brief review (w/spoilers)

bfwebster on June 9th, 2008

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 [...]

Continue reading about Horrors from the Uncanny Valley