WildCat in the style of Eadweard Muybridge, the photographer whose breakthrough technique at the turn of the century ushered in the study of animals in motion.
In this week's We're Doomed segment, a look at our future masters.
Oddly, STB and Jack White both pointed this one out to me. (He has a blog on The Vault. JW that is, not STB.) It's probably the first time their interests have ever coincided and neither of them said whether they actually liked what they saw. One imagines that both of them clearly envisioned the end of the human race while watching this otherwise routine YouTube video.
My god, it's fast. And so inhuman.
STB sent me this one too. This robot actually runs, as in picks up both feet in a human style that results in both feet being off the ground at the same time during part of the cycle. It's a first, and, assuming you want a robot that can run, a breakthrough. Bipedal running makes it seem quite human. A chicken might surmise it was a very chicken robot, of course.
Here's an even more likely end of days scenario. With a shrinking, aging population and a dislike of immigration, Japan is developing ways to care to for people without using people. This is not at all human, in a way that is far creepier than the robot hand. RIBA gives me the willies but I have a feeling I'll be seeing that face again sometime.
Just that - Dancing Japanese Robots. Nothing else to say, really. I like the way they subverted my expectations, which is that all Japanese robots are masculine. The only thing that could be better is if they were to be Dancing Japanese Robots playing teh thereminz, because that would riches beyond the dreams of avarice.
As I write this, the EATR is under active development. The Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot, funded by Darpa, is a robot designed to eat everything in front of it for fuel. Fuel that it will use to swarm around with its mates and kill humans. Even better – once the human corpses have dried out a bit, EATR could eat them too, to fuel more roaming and swarming and human-killing. Sure, the builder, RTI, states that this filthy business is for “the benefit of humanity”. But if Darpa could have found a way to fit a death ray on to the internet… well, most of you probably wouldn’t be around to read this. EATR – they called it EATR! – isn’t intended to roll around the farm and eat slugs for power like that cute little agri-bot that was on the BBC a few years back. EATR will eat logs and roadkill and shrubs and basically anything that is or was alive – and all in the pursuit of gunning down,[and] blowing up ... humans.
It turns out EATR is real. He has not made it up. It sounds like Philip K Dick's Second Variety but it won't be Russians it'll be fighting.
We probably don't have to worry though. Nothing DARPA ever does escapes from their labs and takes on a life of its own. Remember that "internet" thingy? Fizzle!
Match of the day - football played by robots. This is Bowdoin College vs. Carnegie Mellon University from May the third. It has an ethereal, Mogadon quality to it that's simultaneously exciting and calming. But you do want the little bastards to fight and win.
The army's machine-gun wielding, insurgent-slaying robot SWORDS is no longer spraying foes with hot doom in Iraq. Actually, it never got the chance to notch a single frag, and never will. Apparently, there was an incident where "the gun started moving when it was not intended to move," meaning it totally pointed somewhere it wasn't supposed to—like at friendlies, which resulted in recall from the field and might've set the program back 10-20 years, according to the Army's Program Executive Officer for Ground Forces, Kevin Fahey.
Phew. I'm having enough trouble with the lizard overlords to deal with the robot masters as well.
It's cool. Because it's a robot - playing a Theremin!
I've posted before, rather briefly, about a Theremin, and there I think my point (if I had one) was that there was something awesome about Jimmy Page, a man who could not only play a Theremin, but also influence another man into being an instrument for him. It's entirely fitting that somebody somewhere can make a robot play a completely electronic instrument. It's not quite as spiritually or as emotionally captivating, but it has something transcendent about it nevertheless. And you have to admire a man (I guess it's a man) who has the technical know-how, the patience AND the playfulness to pull it off. Seen via Making Light.
I sometimes mention a product on this blog, and I give a URL to Amazon or similar sites. Just to reassure you, I don't get paid to advertise anything here and I don't get any money from your clicks. Everything I say here is because I feel like saying it.
