Sci-Tech Megapost

From Robots to Chocolate. No Chocolate Robots Though.

Robo-Dog
From the good folks at DARPA (motto: Nothing's Too Crazy!) comes the latest public-private partnership to create our inevitable overthrow by robots: Big Dog!

BigDog is the alpha male of the Boston Dynamics family of robots. It is a quadruped robot that walks, runs, and climbs on rough terrain and carries heavy loads. BigDog is powered by a gasoline engine that drives a hydraulic actuation system. BigDog's legs are articulated like an animal’s, and have compliant elements that absorb shock and recycle energy from one step to the next. BigDog is the size of a large dog or small mule, measuring 1 meter long, 0.7 meters tall and 75 kg weight.

BigDog has an on-board computer that controls locomotion, servos the legs and handles a wide variety of sensors. BigDog’s control system manages the dynamics of its behavior to keep it balanced, steer, navigate, and regulate energetics as conditions vary. Sensors for locomotion include joint position, joint force, ground contact, ground load, a laser gyroscope, and a stereo vision system. Other sensors focus on the internal state of BigDog, monitoring the hydraulic pressure, oil temperature, engine temperature, rpm, battery charge and others.

In separate trials, BigDog runs at 4 mph, climbs slopes up to 35 degrees, walks across rubble, and carries a 340 lb load.

BigDog is being developed by Boston Dynamics with the goal of creating robots that have rough-terrain mobility that can take them anywhere on Earth that people and animals can go. The program is funded by the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA).

That's the advertising bumph. Surprisingly human and not exactly trying to sell you anything.

Then again, they already have their one and only client, and DARPA has deep pockets. Check out the video:

Sources: Boston Dymanics
Youtube

Junk Mail
Oh, Post Office! You and I were getting along so well, with my Netflixes and cheap shipping on packages! Why must you forsake me?

Chris Pearson, a state legislator in Vermont, had a sense that the people were with him when he proposed a bill last November to allow residents to block junk mail.

He got media attention, radio interview requests and e-mails from constituents eager to stop the credit card offers, furniture catalogues and store fliers that increasingly clog their mailboxes.

Then came the pushback from the postmasters, who told Pearson and other lawmakers that "standard" mail, the post office's name for junk mail, has become the lifeblood of the U.S. Postal Service and that jobs depend on it.

"The post office and the business groups are pretty well-organized," said Pearson, whose bill remains in a committee and has not been scheduled for a vote.

Barred by law from lobbying, the Postal Service is nonetheless trying to make its case before a growing number of state legislatures that are weighing bills to create Do Not Mail registries, which are similar to the popular National Do Not Call Registry.

The agency has printed 3,000 "information packets" about the economic value of standard mail, with specific data for each of the 18 states that have considered a Do Not Mail Registry. It has dispatched postmasters to testify before legislative committees around the country.

"The Postal Service has come in and clobbered legislators," said Todd Paglia, executive director of ForestEthics, an environmental group that has collected 289,000 signatures on an online petition to Congress that calls for a National Do Not Mail Registry. "It's really a people-versus-special interest kind of battle."

The Postal Service is working closely with the Direct Marketing Association, the trade group that represents retailers and the printing industry, in its new campaign -- Mail Moves America -- which is designed to quash the Do Not Mail initiatives.

So far, their efforts appear effective. None of the states where Do Not Mail legislation has been introduced since 2007 has approved a law. And no similar legislation is pending in Congress.

Come on, people! Junk mail is clearly abusive, though not as bad by an order of magnitude compared with phone spam or even email spam.

You guys do such great work with packages and netflix-type applications. Don't go evil for a few bucks now.

Seriously, there's a real diminishing return here. Netflix already wants to move to all-internet based movie viewing, with no physical dvds being shipped. I use their Instant Viewer service a lot. People like me, if annoyed enough, will drop entire mediums for convenience; I don't use my landline phone for anything these days. I pay my bills online, do my banking online, never send or receive letters of consequence. I could easily move to an entirely mail-free existence, and I'm sure that a lot of other people will as well, if junk mail becomes an email or phone scale problem.

This is shooting yourself in the foot.

Source: The Washington Post

Yes Wii Can!
The Onion reports on the latest scourge caused by videogames: Effeminate Violence.

WASHINGTON—Concerned parents are again blasting the Nintendo Wii for an incident of effeminate violence following a 13-year-old boy's limp-wristed attack on three of his classmates at a Cleveland-area middle school Tuesday.

...

"These games are a prissy little menace to our society," said Linda Roberts, 35, a mother of three and founder of the group Parents Against Wii, which is suing Nintendo for $52 million in damages from two recent swattings. "One of these days, the red marks on our children's arms might not just go away after five minutes."

THINK OF THE... yeah, you get the idea.

This does explain the continuing sissification of my Wii owning brother in law though.

Source: The Onion

From the Desk of Tom Morris
A racist radio tube ad!

GIANT ROBOT
Skynet gets ever closer.

Yesterday SMD loaded UT1 (Ultra Trencher 1), a remote controlled submersible robot (ROV), on to a ship for delivery to CTC Marine Projects. The pounds 10m machine will be the world's largest ROV which is capable of self propelling and supporting its own weight in water.

Weighing 50 tonnes and the size of small house, it is designed to bury largediameter oil and gas pipelines laid on the ocean floor.


It does this by "flying" down up to a mile deep below the surface using powerful propellers.

It then lands over the pipeline and deploys a pair of "jet swords" either side of the pipe which inject high pressure water to "fluidise" the surface. Burying the pipelines protects them from fishing, shipwrecks and natural currents. This enables oil and gas to be safely transported from the offshore fields to land to provide secure energy supplies.

So basically this is designed to prevent the sort of 'accidents' that led to all those internet outages recently, by sending a giant robot down to bury the pipes.

Nifty.

Source: redOrbit

Comcastic!
Today when I got up I found a red light on my digital cable box under the MSGS heading. I've never seen one there before so I was wondering what was going on. Normally when a previously quiet piece of hardware suddenly pipes up with a message, it's something like 'I've got a bad part, please call Service Department' or 'I require a firmware upgrade, please follow these instructions'. You know, important stuff.

No, no, not this time. See, we used to have Insight, and they got bought by Comcast. Who are now using the hardware messages inbox on my cable box to spam me about Wrestlemania.

Sigh.

In light of that abuse, this story is even more... ominous is the wrong word, because it's just TV. Annoying?

cayenne8 sends us to Newteevee.com for a blog posting reporting from the Digital Living Room conference earlier this week. Gerard Kunkel, Comcast's senior VP of user experience, stated that the cable company is experimenting with different camera technologies built into its devices so it can know who's in your living room. Cameras in the set-top boxes, while apparently not using facial recognition software, can still somehow figure out who is in the room, and customize user preferences for cable (favorite channels, etc.). While this sounds 'handy,' it also sounds a bit like the TV sets in 1984. I am sure, of course, that Comcast wouldn't tap into this for any reason, nor let the authorities tap into this to watch inside your home in real time without a warrant or anything."

Yeah. I'm not going to allow any such thing in my house, thanks. Electrical tape is our friend (as the first response on the site indicates).

Source: Slashdot

Giant Chocolate Castle
The roommate will want to move to Croatia now.

A Croatian man claimed Saturday that he has built the biggest castle made of chocolate after working for 24 hours on his candy construction in a central Zagreb square, national television reported.

The three-meter (10 feet) high construction with six-by-two-meter base was made of chocolate bars from a local producer Kras.

...

Some 100,000 chocolate bars were used to build the castle, which weighs 10 tonnes.

Source: Raw Story

OH GOD WHY
Some sick individual is creating 'real life' Simspons using CG.

The horror. The Homer.

Regen
Medicine is learning to make your body parts regrow. This is a good thing.

Three years ago, Lee Spievack sliced off the tip of his finger in the propeller of a hobby shop airplane.

What happened next, Andrews reports, propelled him into the future of medicine. Spievack's brother, Alan, a medical research scientist, sent him a special powder and told him to sprinkle it on the wound.

"I powdered it on until it was covered," Spievack recalled.

To his astonishment, every bit of his fingertip grew back.

"Your finger grew back," Andrews asked Spievack, "flesh, blood, vessels and nail?"

"Four weeks," he answered.

...

Emerging from an everyday ink jet printer is the heart of a mouse. Mouse heart cells go into the ink cartridge and are then sprayed down in a heart shaped pattern layer by layer.

The article goes on to mention work on artificial throats, heart surgery using stem cells, etc.

Progress!

Source: CBS News

Clones
Another day, another scientific breakthrough opposed by Protestants and Catholics alike. Somebody shoot me.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Researchers who used cloned embryonic stem cells to treat Parkinson's disease in mice said on Sunday they worked better than other cells.


The researchers were trying to prove that it is possible to make embryonic stem cells using cloning technology and use them to provide a tailor-made treatment.

...

Tabar and his team first created a Parkinson's-like disease in mice using chemicals to destroy their brain cells.

They took ordinary cells from the tails of the mice, transferred the nuclei from them into hollowed-out mouse eggs cells, and made clones of the mice. This process is called somatic cell nuclear transfer, or "therapeutic cloning."

The cloned embryos were harvested for their stem cells after a few days. The researchers grew these in the lab and coaxed them into becoming the so-called dopaminergic brains cells that are lost in Parkinson's.

They put these into the brains of the injured mice. These mice got better, Tabar said.

No one has done this before. "It's incredibly hard and it involves a series of inefficient steps," Tabar said.

...

Some people oppose using cloning technology to make human embryonic stem cells, or to creating human embryos for this purpose. It is also difficult to obtain human egg cells.

Of course, some people also think that if you create a human clone it will lack a 'soul' and be, I dunno, Damien.

In which case, what's the problem with using it for parts? Not a lot of consistency there.

Source: Raw Story

Oak Island
Some kind of whacky hidden piratey treasure pit.

Ok, so it doesn't say anything about pirates. Still, who else buries treasure on the beach?

Weird.

Source: Active Mind

Satellite Radio
So Sirius and XM are going ahead with their merger plans. The Justice Department approved the merger on anti-trust grounds, which makes sense, as these are US corporations and subject to anti-trust laws. But the next part is interesting: the FCC has to approve it as well.

Huh?

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Sirius Satellite Radio's $4.59 billion purchase of rival XM Satellite Radio was given antitrust clearance on Monday as the Justice Department concluded consumers have many alternatives, including mobile phones and personal audio players.


The deal, announced in February 2007, would combine the only two providers of satellite radio in the United States and is still being reviewed by the Federal Communications Commission.

...

The FCC must determine whether the XM-Sirius is in the public interest, and whether to enforce its 1997 order barring either satellite radio company from acquiring the other.

A source at the FCC said FCC Chairman Kevin Martin has yet to make a proposal either approving or opposing the XM-Sirius combination, but has asked the agency's staff to draft documents for different possible outcomes.

What I want to know is, why does the FCC get any say at all? Granted, there are ground-based repeaters for satellite radio to improve performance in cities, but aside from that, these are SATELLITE BASED signals. The FCC has no authority over space. If they want to regulate the repeaters on the ground as if they were terrestrial radio stations, fine; but the overall business is in UN regulated territory.

I emphasize: The United States DOES NOT OWN SPACE.

Source: Raw Story

Thanks a Lot, El Presidente
So our man-child in chief's asinine plan to build a MOON BASE(tm) has resulted in NASA running out of money for actual science.

Scientists plan to put one of the twin Mars rovers to sleep and limit the activities of the other robot to fulfill a NASA order to cut $4 million from the program's budget, mission team members said Monday.


The news comes amid belt-tightening at NASA headquarters, which is under pressure to cover cost overruns of a flagship Mars mission to land a Hummer-sized rover on the Red Planet next year.

The solar-powered rovers Spirit and Opportunity have dazzled scientists and the public with findings of geologic evidence that water once flowed at or near the surface of Mars long ago.

Both rovers were originally planned for three-month missions at a cost of $820 million, but are now in their fourth year of exploration. It costs NASA about $20 million annually to keep the rovers running.

The latest directive from NASA to cut $4 million means Spirit will be forced into hibernation in the coming weeks, said principal investigator Steve Squyres of Cornell University.

"It's very demoralizing for the team," Squyres said.

That's ok though, because in 20 years, we'll have... nothing. Nothing at all to show for this. Because there's no reason to build a base on the moon, and no practical way to do it.

Idiot.

Source: Raw Story

Message from 1986
Now if only we could send one back warning them about Dan Quayle.

Merle Brandell and his black lab Slapsey were beachcombing along the Bering Sea when he spied a plastic bottle among the Japanese glass floats he often finds along the shore of his tiny Alaskan fishing village.


He walked over and saw an envelope tucked inside. After slicing the bottle open, Brandell found a message from an elementary school student in a suburb of Seattle. The fact that the letter traveled 1,735 miles without any help from the U.S. postal service is unusual, but that's only the beginning of the mystery.

About 21 years passed between the time Emily Hwaung put the message in a soda bottle and Merle Brandell picked it up on the beach.

The article notes the changing attitudes toward these school projects; today, dumping a ton of plastic bottles in the ocean would be seen as, err, littering, and the letter attached to the bottle offers to send the recipient a picture of the little girl who wrote the it.

Oops.

Source: Raw Story

Holy Bat-Tastrophe!
Not a funny story, actually.

Al Hicks was standing outside an old mine in the Adirondacks, the largest bat hibernaculum, or winter resting place, in New York State.

It was broad daylight in the middle of winter, and bats flew out of the mine about one a minute. Some had fallen to the ground where they flailed around on the snow like tiny wind-broken umbrellas, using the thumbs at the top joint of their wings to gain their balance.

All would be dead by nightfall. Mr. Hicks, a mammal specialist with the state’s Environmental Conservation Department, said: “Bats don’t fly in the daytime, and bats don’t fly in the winter. Every bat you see out here is a ‘dead bat flying,’ so to speak.”

They have plenty of company. In what is one of the worst calamities to hit bat populations in the United States, on average 90 percent of the hibernating bats in four caves and mines in New York have died since last winter.

Wildlife biologists fear a significant die-off in about 15 caves and mines in New York, as well as at sites in Massachusetts and Vermont. Whatever is killing the bats leaves them unusually thin and, in some cases, dotted with a white fungus. Bat experts fear that what they call White Nose Syndrome may spell doom for several species that keep insect pests under control.

Researchers have yet to determine whether the bats are being killed by a virus, bacteria, toxin, environmental hazard, metabolic disorder or fungus. Some have been found with pneumonia, but that and the fungus are believed to be secondary symptoms.

“This is probably one of the strangest and most puzzling problems we have had with bats,” said Paul Cryan, a bat ecologist with the United States Geological Survey. “It’s really startling that we’ve not come up with a smoking gun yet.”

So a mystery disease is wiping out bats in New York. They're hoping to keep it from spreading, but...

Uggh. We need every ally we can get against mosquitos, damn it!

Source: The New York Times

Programmer Painting
So the first programmer in the world was a woman, which I did not know, by the name of Ada Lovelace, or formally, Ada Byron, Countless of Lovelace. She's something of an icon in computing circles, and there was even a character named after her in Narbonic (which I need to finish some time). The US military named a programming language after her, and Microsoft uses her image for some promotional materials.

It turns out that her image is known to the modern world from a painting. Well, a copy of a painting. The original portrait had been lost... until now.

It was assumed that the original portrait had been lost forever, until a Canadian antique dealer put the original framed watercolor sketch on eBay. The posting would have faded into oblivion if it wasn’t for US Army Master Sergeant Robert McLaughlin.

Currently posted at the United States Embassy in dusty and remote Tajikistan, McLaughlin frequently searches eBay for Ada Lovelace-related items. In a weekly ritual, partly to keep sane and mainly to keep in touch with friends, he sends the results to “Valkyrie”, a friend in Texas. “Ada is Valkyrie’s heroine,” he told us.

The find sparked a flurry of emails, Skype messages and phone calls between fellow computer geeks, historians and antique dealers who tried to authenticate the drawing. Experts soon agreed that the portrait was done in the 1820s when Ada was approximately four-years-old. McLaughlin bid for the portrait and put in another bid with the last moments of bidding. Who would have thought that Army anti-sniper training would be so relevant to eBay bidding these days?

McLaughlin took early leave to pick up the sketch in Southern California. He and Valkyrie met us at a top-secret location (cough Starbucks cough) in Redlands, CA to show off the frame and authenticity letter. Cradling the frame like a baby, Valkyrie joked, “She looks pretty good for being so old.”

So there you have it. The first programmer's surviving portrait ends up for sale and rediscovery via the power of the interwebs.

It's fitting, in an odd way.

Source: TG Daily


Ok....

The Pentagon has announced that it mistakenly shipped non-nuclear ballistic missile components to Taiwan from a U.S. Air Force base in Wyoming.

It said the items have been returned to the United States.

At a Pentagon news conference, Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne said the misshipped items were four nose cone assemblies for ICBMs. He also said they were delivered to Taiwan in March 2005 and had been sent instead of helicopter batteries that had been ordered by Taiwan.

...

Ryan Henry, the No. 2 policy official in the office of Defense Secretary Robert Gates, said President Bush was notified of the mistake and the actions to recover the items. Henry called the mistake "disconcerting" and intolerable. He said the Chinese government has been notified of the error.

Henry said an examination of the site in Taiwan where the components had been stored after delivery indicated that they had not been tampered with. He said the components were "quite dated," as part of a system designed in the 1960s.

I won't rant about 'how could you mistake a nosecone for a helicopter battery'; I'm an adult, I know that one big crate with a barcode on it looks much the same as another, and you don't check everything that goes out through your shipping department.

Still, you'd think that there'd be some sort of flag on parts for a NUCLEAR WEAPON DELIVERY SYSTEM. Even on the barcode sticker. Maybe, say, a big, red dot?

That'd be nice.

Source: Raw Story