Interesting Stuff

Man, would I like to know how that works. Its balancing algorithm is incredible!

I really ought to finish this entry. Better late than never, eh?

Yesterday (being about a week and a half ago), I woke up at 3:30 AM, which was strange, because it was a full half-hour before my alarm was set to go off. I needed to get an early start on the day if I was going to be in Victorville (over 100 miles away) by 7:00. Find out what I was doing →

Some of my readers have said they want me to post more videos I find. So here’s a Lego production line that makes cars. The button-pushing at the beginning selects what colors to use for each of the pieces. I’m very impressed with whoever made this; it’s quite a feat. Side note: how hard do you think it would be to make a von Neumann machine out of Legos? Easier or harder than making it out of custom parts?

…and just for the hell of it, here are some kittens having fun with an empty Coke box:

As more details come out, it looks like I was spot-on last night in my analysis of the embassy bombing in Athens. Hot damn!

It turns out one of my coworkers used to work for Evolution Robotics, which made the ER1 I used in my robotics research a year and a half ago. It’s nice to know that he agrees with me that the ER1 could have been a great product except the basic software, power converter, and marketing department were crap (though apparently if we had sprung for the $1,000 software it would have worked better). Intriguingly, he also thinks that adding a laptop and camera to a Roomba is a good way to get a cheap robot, which is what Prof. Dodds is doing now (he was my robotics research prof). Nifty!

Yesterday, I got to see a live video feed of Steve Wozniak talking about his youth and how he cofounded Apple Computers. A summary of the talk →