Watch the video. Go watch the video.
Of this robot.
Even it’s not autonomous, it’s a framework that could go almost anywhere. Ingenious.
Archive for March, 2006
We want you always to see the original, and never to believe it superfluous
We are reminded of the flexibility of written and electronic records, and of our heritage:
You can’t trust digital images of historical artifacts. They can easily be altered, even to fool the eyes of those who look for obscure clues like the laid lines in the paper.
The end of Knight-Ridder
[O]ne of our few courageous and honest sources of information has just been put to the sword
Ask who, and why. Pass it on.
The world we make ourselves live in
Metapsychology Online Book Reviews - Human-Built World:
At the same time technology also inspired ‘rebellion’ in some artists who turned away from machine worship and industrial systematization to spontaneous art, embracing randomness, disorder and “chance operations”…
I’ve hinted at it before: I expect such a “rebellion” from engineers as well, sometime in the next few decades.
(Via 3quarksdaily.)
intergalactic self-defense mechanisms
rayguns (intergalactic self-defense mechanisms) - a photoset on Flickr:
(Via MAKE: blog.)
Eventually it all worked out, though. Right?
Except for the dead, that is.
Quoting a contemporary letter from an American soldier:
“Talk about war being ‘hell,’ this war beats the hottest estimate ever made of that locality. Caloocan was supposed to contain seventeen thousand inhabitants. The Twentieth Kansas swept through it, and now Caloocan contains not one living native. Of the buildings, the battered walls of the great church and dismal prison alone remain. The village of Maypaja, where our first fight occurred on the night of the fourth, had five thousand people on that day, — now not one stone remains upon top of another. You can only faintly imagine this terrible scene of desolation. War is worse than hell.”–Captain Elliott, of the Kansas Regiment, February 27th
Masturbibliation
So, animals that contain hemoglobin (vertebrates) and therefore have
red blood can be considered “living” and animals that contain
hemocyanin, or other proteins (invertebrates) and therefore have blue
(pink/violet or brown) blood can be considered “nonliving”. This is
further supported by Scripture since the Hebrew for “blood” (dawm)
is derived from the Hebrew for “red” (aw-dam). And with Genesis
1:20-22 and Leviticus 11:10, there is a distinction between
“living” creatures and “swarming/moving” creatures that teem in
the waters. So the logical conclusion can be made that a “living”
creature is one that contains red blood.
Along the way, the eminent Dr. Myers has shown us a word that I nominate for instant inclusion in the canonical vocabulary: masturbibliation.
Lying season, lying years
Dean Dad discusses how he deals with being lied to, not by students, but by tenured professors:
I endure being lied to by trying to place it in the big picture. At the end of the day, if telling me tall tales makes Professor X feel better so that he can actually focus on his job, then my patient endurance has improved the college. If listening through the twisted paranoid fantasies of Professor Y gives me some insight as to what makes him tick, I have a better chance of getting what I need from him later. I have to have faith that I can see the outlines of a pony beneath all that horseshit. I don’t reward emotional manipulators by taking the bait. I keep enough distance to avoid getting sucked into other people’s psychodrama.
“The torpor of his mind renders him… incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation…”
At Stumbling and Mumbling: Adam Smith’s influence:
The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. The torpor of his mind renders him not only incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any generous, noble, or tender sentiment, and consequently of forming any just judgment concerning many even of the ordinary duties of private life. Of the great and extensive interests of his country he is altogether incapable of judging…. It is otherwise in the barbarous societies.
This has, needless to say, nothing whatsoever to do with my subjective experience of graduate school.
The sad consequences of a robust moral education
I love the local donut shop. They use the same old Amy Joy recipes I remember from my far-away childhood in Cleveland.
The elderly eponymous owner always stuffs 14 or 15 donuts into a dozen box. His son, maybe in his mid-40s, is a brash loud friendly fellow who always gives you two apple fritters when you ask for one, two cinnamon rolls when you ask for one.
The grandsons, though. I blame the absolutist rule-following equity we (they and I) had drummed in throughout the last four decades of primary education: Rules meant to be followed, not broken. If I do it for you, I’ll have to do it for everybody. The sign says “twelve”.
They give me what I ask for, not what I expect.
Too much of a stretch, jumping from an exact dozen donuts to prediction of the collapse of modern society?
“One measures a circle beginning anywhere.”
And what a lovely frame it has
We are provided with analysis of grade correlations with essay font. My first response (not snippy at all, really, nor pure Mac superciliousness): Try running Apple’s Pages someday and seeing what real-world typographic design can do for your words.
When will the design blindness of the mid 20th Century finally fade? People imagine that museums just pick up any old gold plaster filigree frame from a pile and stick it on a painting. As if the artist didn’t do it himself? Please, somebody at Apple: teach the world to frame their words again.
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