The Onion: Are We Giving Robots Too Much Power?
Panelists discuss whether controversial decisions by the Robot Congress and President Executron indicate robots have too much control over our lives. (via boingboing)
The Sleep Waking robot is the result of a collaboration between Fernando Orellana and Brendan Burns. Orellana spent a night in The Albany Regional Sleep Disorder Center in New York. The staff wired him up and collected data of every conceivable kind: EEG, EKG, rapid eye movement - you name it. Orellana describes the use of the data to animate the robot (…) (link)

A Tokyo University of Science által fejlesztett kvázi-exoskeleton látványos, háromkilós és garantáltan nem rendelhető meg otthonra: többek között egy külső kompresszor meg levegőztető kell ahhoz, hogy a pneumatikai rendszerét működtetni lehessen, azaz inkább gyárakban meg garázsokban fogják használni. (via, via, pdf)
David Levy arról ír könyvet, hogy miért lesz majd jobb robotokkal dugni (amire a Wired pikírten megjegyzi, hogy lehet, hogy azért jobb, ha a nőket Windowson futtatjuk), a tokiói fogászok meg szmogfútta arcok helyett a Simroid szájában turkálhatnak. A 2007-es International Robot Exhibition alkalmával bemutatott robotot a Kokoro Company Ltd. gyártotta (hasonlóan az Actroid recepciósrobothoz), érzékeny fogai vannak, érzékeli, hogy mikor vét a fogász hibát és még fájdalmat is imitál, ha kell. A realizmus kedvéért gag reflex is van benne (nemvigyorog!), azaz öklendezik, ha a fogászműszerek túl mélyre mennének a szájában vagy torkában, a berlini szexboltok imádnák. (via)
Metropolis’s sexy, dangerous cyborg became the template for countless others, though not for several decades. There were few fembots in the mid-20th century, but the desire to connect beautiful women and high-tech machines was manifest in the cheesecake pinups painted on fighter planes and the dramatic curves of 1950s roadsters. Indeed, cars were the fembots of the Cold War era, with voluptuous lines and sparkling fins designed to echo the female form. Robots, on the other hand, were depicted as clumsy automatons like Robby the Robot in Forbidden Planet (1956). Despite Robby’s male name, the sweet, lumpy ’bot acted like a traditional housewife, bustling around, making clothes, and cooking for the other characters. (via popsci)
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The television skies of Chiba City branded his brains in 1992. He hasn't recovered fully since. Re-wired his brain with a few years of FastTracker, hosted radio shows on the first .hu netradio for 4 years, went on to broadcast radio for another two. Worked on the absurd radio series Kónuszék, that actually led him to become a script writer for the multiple-award winning animation Nyócker.Started LD50 in 2001, an alternative community portal for some, a media experiment for him. DJ'd and organized for 6 years @ Budapest: the first weekly gothic/industrial clubnights, the VK/jrock Nippon Shoxx and the biggest local industrial/cyber party series called Kollektíva, among many. Key figure behind the cyberpunk PDF magazine THE DOSE and he's making a comeback with it. He's currently an IT/science journalist, with a love for weird stuff, Asian cuisine, pop culture, energy drinks, coffee and chili, eyecandy, Japan and a life-long devotion to all things cyberpunk & slipstream. |