While I am generally immune to Gadget Lust, this camera here ignites it pretty effectively. I especially love the useless but required action of winding the digital camera. Sweet.
p.s. I have been machining like a madman, but have had to put the robot on hold until after the weekend, while I put down my hardwood flooring.
I know that you will like it. So where is it from? Bruce Sterling has it on his blog but I have no idea where HE found it.
Haw! -> this rules on so many levels.
P.S. Working hard on the bot right now. Pix soon. Competition tomorrow.
Found this on Metafilter:
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/040519/234/726q1.html
also:
http://andykaufmanreturns.blogspot.com/
Full press release below, in case it gets nuked as a fraud/hoax:
Andy Kaufman Returns After 20 Years
Wed May 19, 9:00 AM ET
New York City, NY (PRWEB) May 19, 2004 -- Twenty years ago, on May 16, 1984, most of the world believed that we had lost a comedic legend forever. This has turned out to be what will inevitably be known as the greatest comic prank ever conceived. Andy Kaufman, by all accounts, is alive and well at age 55 and is now living in New York City on the upper west side. To his loyal supporters and fans, Andy says "sorry about faking my death," in a recent interview with ABC News at his apartment. In order to reach legendary comic status and seal his place in the history of performance art, he said it was "necessary to go away for twenty years."
Andy Kaufman's official site has been launched at:
http://andykaufmanreturns.blogspot.com/
Even though he has technically returned, Andy says that he plans to maintain his low key lifestyle that he has led for the past twenty years. He has resumed contact with friends and family. Fearing the possibility of this scenario and the potential for another hoax, Kaufman's family has contracted with independent auditors Ernst & Young to determine if this in fact the real Andy Kaufman. He has subjected himself to medical examination and submitted DNA, hair, blood and fingerprint samples to the auditors. Ernst & Young and the Kaufman family report that with a 99% probability, this is indeed the real Andy Kaufman. His mother says, "It's good to have Andy back."
In 1999, a new crop of Kaufman fans were born after Jim Carrey starred in the hit film Man on the Moon. "Andy's bizarre mix of comedy and performance art will inspire fans and comedians alike for generations, especially after this stunt," says Jim Carrey.
Andy says he will make only occasional public appearances, sometimes in disguise so that you won?t know if it?s really him or someone else. Kaufman was famous for pulling this stunt with the Tony Clifton character, sometimes played by good friend Bob Zmuda.
Andy says fans should tune into his website for ongoing updates to his adventures in life. As always, Andy's stage has been the world, testing the boundaries of our beliefs, our sources of information, and our perception of reality. "It's good to be back," Andy writes on his website.
# # #
Andy Kaufman
E-mail Information
This news release was issued on behalf of the above organization by the eMediawire Newswire, a service of PRWeb™. http://www.prweb.com
HUMAN KLEENEX is a video of president Bush surreptitiously cleansing his glasses on someone's sweater.
We all know that this guy is kind of self serving, but c'mon now. You are the most powerful man in the free world, yet here you are looking around to make sure nobody notices you using the production manager as an eyeglass cleanser. This isn't the end of the world. It isn't a scandal. Just ask somebody for a Kleenex™. Kind of the behviour you expect out of your harmless but batty uncle who drinks to much... Oh yeah.... Never mind.
Show some decorum. Jeez.
Check this out.... a life size Volvo XC90 made entirely from lego. It even kinda looks like a pixelated photoshop job at first, but it is the real deal.
I had no idea that working on diesel engines was supposed to be cool...
Laughing Squid >>> underground art and culture. How can you not love a Cthulhu themed art and culture online organization, which also seems to enjoy blowing shit up, and building "Giant evil robots".
Bonus points for a Vancouver specific page: Laughing Squid >>>Vancouver.
Unbelievable Honda/A-Wing crossbreed
Ya gotta respect the amount of work that went into it though.....
Every once in a while I see something that blows my mind. In todays news, scientists have created Silica Nanofiliments which are a smaller diameter than the wavelength of the light that they carry. This is spooky. Check this picture of one of the wires out. It is wrapped around a single human hair. You can see collimar interference patterns along it's length.
I think I can understand how the light follows the guide although the diameter is so small (light will slow down inside the glass, causing the wavicles to seek the center), but it still wierds me out. At this scale, do the photons form a probabilistic cloud around the filiment? Just asking. Not a physics geek to that degree.
Cimmerian now has a blog. Let's see how long until he uses it...
I am betting about three months (which is the update interval for most of his sites ;)
Interesting... I have a cheap stainless mug that I drink from at work, and it makes the coffee taste like crap.... except I always thought it was the coffee. When I used a ceramic mug at work today, the coffee was fine!
An explanation why follows:
A little research and I find out that only high end mugs use 18/10 stainless, and that many are made from lower (and less immune to etching) grades of steel. From Phaelon56 on the Coffee Geek Forums:
I don't recall ever seeing milk steamed/frothed in anything but an 18/10 pitcher. If there was even the most remote chance that using high quality stainless steel in such an application could somehow affect taste, I imagine that industry perfectinists such as David Schomer would long ago have detected this and commented on it (he's famous for his anal attention to detail - BTW that's a compliment!).
I consider aluminum to be at the bottom of the heap (remembering my "tin" drinking cup from Boy Scout camping days of long ago). Plastic is next - it tends to get scuffed easily, absorbs odors and flavors and is difficult to clean (not to mention the weird feel on the lips). Glass, properly glazed china/porcelain and 18/10 stainless steel all have their own merits. I like glass for the visual, porcelain for the delicate feel and heavy glazed china for the solid feel and insulating effect of the thermal mass. Having now owned a couple Frobosk Inox 18/10 double wall cappa sets and also latte sets for a few months now.... stainless rules!
My natural tendencies on the most subconscious and conscious levels draw me toward organic and natural materials and environments. I found the transition to the Froboks cups to be a difficult one at first - it lacks the aestehtic appeal of ceramic or porcelain. Now that I've grown accustomed to them, the remarkable insulating qualities and neutrality have become major assets - it's as though the cup has become transparent in a sense.
My heart remains with ceramic, my eyes with glass but taste buds rule and stainless is the winner.
Ornery Boy. The story of a goth gamer boy, his goth nurturing girlfriend, and their pet zombie.
Looks like Generation5.org has updated to a new software package. I have been a long time lurker on that site, as it has always had interesting AI related news that seems to get missed elsewhere.
Robot geeks would also do well to check out Robots.Net to get their robot jones on.
Looks like pagerank is finally going the way of the dodo. No big surprise there, since it has been easy to take advantage of for a long time. It is no secret that deliberately cross linking can increase your rank, but there is now a lot of conjecture as to how Google knows which pages to cull. Here is an idea on how they are doing it.
I am guessing that blogs have a unique and easily detected text string that makes the job a no brainer.
Hint: It's the trackbacks stupid.
Maybe. From Google's of view it is an obvious string to search for that indicates that a site is trying to artificially (remember... from Google's point of view) inflate it's importance.
This is probably even a fair assessment, since pagerank hinges more on the effects of links added by a human (ie:Less efficient information aggregator) rather than an automated source. Most bloggers, myself included, don't exclude their pages via robots.txt, so this stuffs Google chock full of automated entries.
Google's weighting system (which is honestly a paleolithic piece of software, even if it is still pretty effective), wasn't designed to take this into account, so they have to tweak it somehow so that it DOES take it into account. Ergo: the easiest way to do so is to downgrade the pagerank of sites that contain something like:
<xmlns:trackback="http://madskills.com/public/xml/rss/module/trackback/">
That's how I would do it anyways.
In the absence of anything smarter to say, here is whay I have for the day:
