Cool, at least partly because it’s the robot-gripper that’s an evacuated balloon, filled with coffee grounds – and not only can throw stuff, it’s also quite a good shot. Mind you, it isn’t very far away… but still, grand first try? Pretty good.
That’s what bothers me about sci-fi robots… they’re crap shots. Ballistics involves fairly simple mathematics… far simpler than the technology that it takes to build an autonomous robot for example.
We saw that “Eyeborg” last night – which I quite liked weirdly enough… it reminded me of early 80s low-budget movies. Not much money, but energy and ideas, and because of that, a funny kind of screen-presence. Like Robocop or Repoman etc.
Anyway, without giving too much away… the robots are seriously crap shots… even worse than Imperial Stormtroopers – and this would not happen. A gun platform advanced enough to be autonomous is going to be able to hit a penny at 1000 paces, every single time.
It’s a bit of a worry actually. I mean I can imagine arms-races with these things… but who’s the enemy? We’re not quite there yet… but in a globalised world, all wars are civil-wars.
It’s the sort of project I lie awake at night dreaming about. Probably need (a hell of a lot of) these to get all the plastic out of the sea… although the bits of plastic are tiny etc. Make tiny plastiphile-bots I guess.
Not that these aren’t tiny… 10cm cubed… which is also cool… although it does look a bit like a flight-case.
What will the aliens think when they turn up? I’ll tell you what they’ll think: “Earthlings, LOL” they’ll go. “They’re tiny… and they fly around in little flight-cases”.
I was imagining something more like this
Which is the spaceship from QUARK – which is a 1970s TV program about a space-janitor. I thought it was brilliant when it first came out, but now I’m not so sure.
Unless I’m very much mistook, they’ve pinched the control-panel thing from The Tardis eg:
The weird thing about The Tardis control panel is that it basically stayed the same for about 30 years
and then… the 21st Century arrived, and it actually got older looking
Is that how time-machines work? Not impossible I suppose, but not what I imagined at all.
Anyway, back to the Swiss Cleaner-bot… not entirely sure I understand how it gets the individual bits of stuff… I mean they’re going pretty fast some of them… like 10km/s fast. Rather than have a flight-case, you’d be better off having a massive lump of blu-tack with a block of carbon-fibre or something in the middle.
I love this sort of thing.
I’m starting a fablab btw. Got the premises oked today.
Ok – this post is probably going to be quite incoherent. Stuff has happened etc… turned up, with no rhyme or reason to it, and I am slightly hungover.
Firstly, some art
Someone has made wax models of his facebook friends… but with his own face, and coloured according to how close their survey scores align. A bit like that Chinese terracotta army… but… friendlier.
In a spooky, self-referential sort of way.
It would be quite cool to give them hexapod legs… like these ones etc, but smaller
And they could follow you about, firing pingpong balls and singing rousing patriotic music – the sort of thing that the “I’m So Ronery” guy use to go in for
Who’s son was (according to Chinese Twitterers) assassinated in Beijing this morning, but who probably wasn’t.
So…. apropos of that… I had to buy a smartphone because I invested in this kickstarter thing:
So I got the best Android I could – and my, what a quantum leap that has been… I didn’t have a cellphone at all for about 3 years… my last one was a little steam-powered thing made out of silver plastic with the paint peeling off… so I’ve jumped about 5 evolutionary stages in a single go. Bit of an eye-opener. That is all.
Ok not all – I still think that we haven’t actually fully discovered what smartphones are for yet… I mean they’re “for” making phone calls and taking photos about as much as computers are “for” running spreadsheet software and playing pong.
–
I’ve finally cracked and upgraded my laptop… it was running ubuntu 9.10… now running 10.04… the upgrade took about 4 hours (slow download of big files) and went off without a hitch… on a dual-boot PC. I was a bit worried about that… but as is the way with linux, a smattering of small, but really fucking hard to fix hassles is slowly coming to light, eg:
1) plugging in headphones doesn’t mute the onboard speakers
2) I remap the keyboard (because whoever designed “the keyboard” was a fucking ning-nong)… and the remapped delete key (RHS ctrl) now acts as CTRL-X.
As well as the usual flotilla of minor annoyances, largely involving disabling new features, and getting the system back the way it was before.
–
I’m opening a fablab in Wellington.
Have incorporated etc – haven’t found premises yet. More on that later.
It’s really easy to use – and the fact that the basis of everything is mathematical makes for better precision… but I kindof wish there was some way of doing beziers.
So many other people have gone on about this already that it seems kindof redundant… still, as I appear to be charting the progress of these things, here it is.
It’s like space-invaders come to life.
I’d be interested to know whether they’re truly autonomous, or whether they’re being controlled by the room – there seems to be a fair few sensors round the walls… which would suggest to me that this isn’t true swarm behaviour… it’s more like a multi-bodied single organism. Like The Borg.
If you look for long enough, you will find yourself. Are you happy? Hard to say. Are you?
They seem very single-minded these people… going about their business etc. I wish I had their… drive. Their get up and go… although I’m guessing a lot of them are like tiny Stepford Wives.
The weird thing about this, is that it looks completely normal and natural. It looks like the way things “should be”. I wonder if we’ll ever get it together. I hope so.
It doesn’t matter what it is. It’s art. This is what science fiction should look like. Actually it’s what science looks like.
I wrote my own rss feed aggregator a year or so ago – it looks a bit like the way Opera renders RSS… which was almost certainly also the inspiration for pinterest I think, which itself has a shitload of clones now… in fact there’s an EU company that’s apparently worth about $200m – and it’s main tactic is to take applications that are foolishly only available to the US market, then clone them, build up a user-base, then sell them to the original companies.
But I digress… I have a hand-coded feed a bit like pinterest, but with 3 columns – and it’s basically science fiction now. Real, but still sci-fi. Kindof. The Sci Fi singularity is almost on us. It’d be fucking cool… if we could just get rid of the fascists.
I’m quite interested in this… in a tangential sort of way, because CNC fabbing makes “showpieces of skill” from yesteryear, downloadable and printable… for example $20,000 antique wooden watches from Russia
Could probably be designed in a CAD system, and fed to a CNC machine. Especially now gaps are being filled… hardware problems are being solved as software problems, eg: this online cog generator:
Which is not to say that Piers Secunda’s puzzle is part of this process – it is (I think) good old fashioned skill, honed over many years. But it’s only a matter of time.
I remember reading somewhere that you could theoretically recapture the sounds of ancient Ethiopia by getting an old Ethiopian pot and rotating it with an ancient Ethiopian’s finger retracing the movements the original one made when it was on the potter’s wheel… like a wheel-thrown pot could act like a giant wax cylinder.
This is like that. Is it? No. Not really. Oh well.
Cool though, in a 70s/60s paleo-non-futuristic sort of way.
